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Library of The Theological Seminary 
PRINCETON : NEW JERSEY 
C<S) 


PRESENTED BY 
John Stuart Conning, D.D. 


DSO109.T52 

Tharaud, J er ome, 1874- 
git pops Fu 

Next year in Jerusalem 








NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/nextyearinjerusa0Othar 


NEXT YEARXIN 
JERUSALEM 


BY | 
JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD 


Translated by 
MADELEINE BOYD 





p 


BONI ann LIVERIGHT 


PUBLISHERS + 1925 bh NEw York 


Copyright, 1925, by 
Bont & Lavericut, Inc. 





Printed in the United States of America 


CHAPTER 


CONTENTS 


Tuer SACRED FIRE . 
Toe WALL or WaAILING 


. Tue Mosaut oF OMAR 
. Tue PROPHET oF THE BOULE- 


VARD 
Tue Voices oF PALESTINE 


. Tue First Lovers or ZIon . 
. THE PIoNEERS oF ISRAEL . 

. Tue Son oF JUDEA 

. THe Story oF SARAH . 


THe Lirrte Girt OF THE 
GHETTO 


107 
117 
131 
177 


205 





THE SACRED FIRE 





CHAPTER I 
THE SACRED FIRE 


WE went forward in the darkness under 
the dim arches and between the high square 
pillars, amid the mingled odors of mildew, 
incense and tallow. The sound of my guide’s 
stick, striking the flagstones heavily, directed 
us through the gloom, which seemed to be 
filled by a rumbling noise, deadened by the 
heavy stone roof. I felt as if we were walk- 
ing in the corridor of a Roman amphitheater 
just before the beginning of a performance, 
with the crowd grumbling impatiently above. 
Then the tapping of the stick stopped and 
everything became bigger, the arches, the 
silence and the rumbling noise which was as 
gloomy as the rest. A low door in the wall. 
I slipped through behind my guide, and we 
went up some very narrow stairs. Here and 
there, on small landings, the sunlight 
gleamed feebly through barred opening's cov- 


C9] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


ered with spiders’ webs, showing dust that 
had been accumulating for centuries. I could 
hear the stick marking each step with that 
fateful accent which a regular noise assumes 
in the dark. Just like my hands on the mil- 
dewed wall my spirit was feeling its way, it 
made no difference where I was, nor what I 
was thinking of, nor what I was going to see. 
The stick stopped again. Silence. ‘Then 
suddenly the air struck my face, and once 
more I heard that rumbling noise, which I 
had momentarily forgotten on that dark 
staircase. 

I found myself in a niche in the thickest 
part of the wall. Through an opening in 
the dome above my head a ray of the sun 
blinded me as I entered. Beneath me lay a 
deep, dark pit, from which the rumbling rose, 
louder now, but as meaningless to me as be- 
fore. There was no light except the one ray 
which seemed to stop half-way down, lke 
a bucket at the end of too short a rope. Grad- 
ually my eyes became accustomed to the 
darkness, and I saw a crowd of people 


[107] 


THE SACRED FIRE 


swarming around a small building. They 
seemed to be carrying it on their shoulders, 
this extraordinary structure, rectangular at 
its base, half-way up shaped like a drum, 
and at the top like a Chinese hat. ‘Tall can- 
dles, rows of lamps, flower-pots of carved 
wood and sacred images covered its walls, 
crowded close to one another as in a shop. All 
these things were cheap, faded, out-of-date 
and gaudy at the same time. It seemed in- 
credible that that dust-covered, vulgar tomb, 
that barbaric work of an unskilled Mytilene 
mason could be the Holy Sepulcher, the 
Tomb of Christ! 

All around it the crowd was shouting, thou- 
sands of Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Arme- 
nians, for the feast of the Sacred Fire which 
is celebrated on Easter Saturday is not a Ro- 
man feast, but an Orthodox one. On that 
day, the divine fire comes down miraculously 
from Heaven to light a lamp in the interior 
of the tomb. Is it a return to the pagan 
celebration of the solstice, rejoicing at the 
departure of winter and the coming of 


Ei 





SNEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM: 


spring? Or is it a symbol of Christ’s resur- 
rection, conceived by an Oriental imagination? 
The origins of the ceremony are obscure. The 
Roman Church observed it for a while. Ur- 
ban the Second believed or pretended to be- 
lieve in the miracle—at any rate it helped 
him to arouse enthusiasm for the Crusades, 
—and many companions of Godefroy and 
Baudouin saw the miracle with their own 
eyes. But even then the miracle was inter- 
mittent and the fire did not come down every 
year. It stopped altogether after Jerusalem 
was taken by Saladin. However, the Greek 
Christians went on believing in it and now 
an invisible Archangel brings the fire down 
from Heaven every year for their benefit. 
While waiting for the fire to appear the 
crowd would shout the same phrase over and 
over again in a monotonous Oriental rhythm, 
then a new phrase would be started and taken 
up with the same fervor, but in a different 
rhythm. The two phrases would vie with 
each other for a while, until one would con- 
quer and impose its barbaric rhythm on the 


[12] 


TOR OS A Cie he) iB Lite 


multitude, only to be displaced in its turn by 
another. 
They would shout: 


“Our faith is the only true faith! 
The Jews are rascals!” 


or: 
“O Jews! Your feast is a Monkey’s 
feast; 
Ours is the Messiah’s.”’ 
and again: 


“The strangers here will leave on 
Tuesday 

With our best wishes for a happy 
journey.” 


I had heard similar shoutings in Morocco 
at the sacred dances of Mohammedan so- 
cieties, but it was surprising to find this 
frenzy in front of Christ’s Tomb. Carried 
away by the rhythm, the slowly moving bod- 
ies gave an oscillation to this packed crowd, 
in which no one could move independently. 

Thousands of Russian pilgrims were miss- 


[13] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


ing. Before the war they came to Jerusalem 
every year for Holy Week and especially 
for this Saturday. From the interior of Rus- 
sia, on foot or by train, they went to Odessa, 
and from there, crowded on ships, they were 
carried to the Holy Land. Their long, rag- 
ged processions, chanting prayers, went up to 
Jerusalem to secure the great treasure, the 
Holy Fire which protects Russian life. But 
they have not come since 1914. The Holy 
Fire has been almost extinguished for them 
by war and revolution. Russia is not repre- 
sented to-day at the Orthodox Feast. And 
looking at the dense mob on which the Holy 
Sepulcher seemed to be floating like an ark, 
I wondered how all the Russians ever found 
room! 

The only empty space was the narrow alley 
leading to the door of the Sepulcher. Be- 
tween two lines of soldiers some English 
officers walked up and down, indifferent to 
all the excitement. Above the solid moving 
mass, where the red fez of Egypt mixed with 
the golden turbans of Damascus and Aleppo 


Liat 





THE SACRED FIRE 


and the white tarboosh of the Kopts, a pleas- 
ing sight rested my eyes, tired by the crowd’s 
monotonous motion which made me feel sea- 
sick. In the corners of the vast rotunda 
boxes had been built with platforms and 
planks, on two or three levels as in a theater. 
In those boxes women dressed in their best 
lay stretched on mattresses and cushions, 
gossiping, peeling oranges and drinking 
lemonade. Each one was like a picture by 
Delacroix. I stopped looking at the dusty 
Holy Sepulcher and at the mad mob, and 
gazed instead at the wooden niche opposite 
mine, occupied by a black-haired, black-eyed, 
barefooted beauty, wearing a red-and-white 
dress touched here and there with purple. 

Suddenly there was a disturbance, created 
by the young men of the town, who pushed 
their way brutally through the crowd, bring- 
ing with them a new phrase, a new rhythm 
which quickly drove away the one which had 
dominated a moment before: 


“Hail, Blessed Virgin!” 
[15 1 


SNEXTOYEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


It is customary for the Greek Patriarch to 
give a very heavy baksheesh to the Moham- 
medan authorities at the time of the festival. 
Naturally the Mohammedans never find the 
sum big enough and each year it is a pre- 
text for interminable disputes. The arrival 
of these youths showed that an agreement 
had been reached and that the moment when 
the Sacred Fire comes down was approach- 
ing at last! In the small boxes the women 
became animated, laid aside their oranges, 
peanuts and pastries, applauded and shouted. 
Down below the tumult redoubled. I saw 
a Jewish member of the English police force 
being put out, passed like a parcel from hand 
to hand above the heads of the crowd while 
every one tried to strike him and thousands 
of voices repeated the chorus: 


“The Jews are sad! The Jews are sad!’ 


Over the tops of the heads—the only way to 
get through the crowd—another man crawled 
on all fours. He was a peacemaker, and 
was trying to persuade the police not to put 


D164 





LAE SACRED FIRE 


out an Orthodox Christian who had been in- 
sulting them. ‘Then a space was cleared in 
the middle of the crowd and a giant began 
to dance, carrying on his shoulders a man 
with a stick in one hand and a package of tal- 
low candles in the other. This increased the 
delirium. The applause and the shouts grew 
wilder. The man standing on the shoulders 
of the giant chanted. in a full voice a phrase 
to which he gave a frenzied rhythm by bran- 
dishing his stick and his candles: 


“The Messiah has come! 
With his blood he has saved us. 
We are joyful to-day 
And the Jews are desolate!’’ 


and the crowd repeated in a chorus: 


‘We are joyful to-day 
And the Jews are desolate!”’ 


In their private path, between the double 
ranks of their soldiers, the English officers 
went on walking to and fro, unbending, in- 


Died 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





different, seemingly incapable of being inter- 
ested in anything. 

At that moment a man came along their 
path wearing a morning suit and carrying his 
straw hat in his hand. He was a rich Kopt 
who had just bought the Sacred Fire at auc- 
tion. When he goes back to his village he 
will give the fire to his church and will be 
held in great esteem by his countrymen. 
Some Greek priests, their heads covered by 
the round bonnet, put on him a surplice and 
a charming cope of a forget-me-not blue with 
gold edges. Near the Kopt stood a Syrian 
who had also paid cash for the favor of light- 
ing his candle from the Patriarch’s. He wore 
an orange dalmatica with a green fringe over 
which was thrown a wide golden scarf. The 
Patriarch himself came next, a handsome old 
man with a white beard. His dalmatica was 
of sky-blue satin; from a necklace of precious 
stones hung a cross scintillating on his chest; 
another cross studded with diamonds crowned 
his tiara of emeralds and sapphires and he 


Lagat 


THE SACRED FIRE 


carried a long crystal cane, two crossed gold- 
en serpents forming its hook. About twenty 
ecclesiastical dignitaries and a crowd of choir 
boys in white surplices and red belts followed 
him. A procession was formed. In front of 
the Patriarch, two priests each carried a 
cornucopia with thirty-three candles—thirty- 
three, the number of years Christ lived. 
Twelve banners preceded him, representing 
the twelve apostles. A thirteenth one fol- 
lowed him, Judas! The crowd was silent 
now, and through the human mass which 
opened as if by enchantment, the procession 
went around the Holy Sepulcher three times 
while an immense shout arose, the call for the 
Sacred Fire: 


“What is rightfully ours, 
O God! Give it unto us!” 


The Patriarch returned. His tiara, his 
dalmatica and his stole were taken off, a white 
handkerchief was tied round each of his 
hands, the two cornucopias with the thirty- 


D194 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


three candles were given to him. The crowd 
was shouting: 


“May God give prosperity to the 
Greek convent! | 
May God give victory to our 
government!” 


I closed my eyes for a moment. I tried 
to imagine this noisy place when it was only 
a lonely spot outside the walls, a small stony 
field with a few olive-trees and, at one end, 
the tomb which Joseph of Arimathea had had 
prepared for himself, a tomb like hundreds of 
others all around Jerusalem. But how could 
I escape even for an instant from this hellish 
noise, how could I believe that silence and 
peace had ever existed here; that silence and 
peace to which the owner of the field had 
looked forward during his lifetime, thinking 
of eternity? 

I opened my eyes. The Patriarch, followed 
by the Armenian bishop, went to the entrance 
of the Holy Sepulcher and disappeared in 
the Tomb. With blows of their fists the Eng- 


[20 7 


THE SACRED FIRE 


lish soldiers pushed back some fanatics who 
tried to follow him. The noise was for- 
midable. It seemed impossible that it could 
grow any louder and yet suddenly it became 
even more deafening. The miracle had taken 
place. Through a hole in the wall the Patri- 
arch held out to the crowd the Sacred Fire 
just down from Heaven, brought by the 
Archangel. Some one lit his candle from the 
flame and the fire, as if in a clearing of dry 
herbs, spread instantaneously over the multi- 
tude as they all shook their thirty-three light- 
ed candles. The bottom of the dark well was 
a vast light—the women’s boxes seemed to be 
ablaze. Some people, perched quite near the 
cupola, pulled up with long ropes the candles 
which were lighted for them down below. 
The mildew which covered the walls looked 
as if it had suddenly taken fire. The loud 
noise of cymbals added to the din of the mal- 
lets striking the iron sheets which are used 
as bells by the Greeks. At the height of the 
fire and the noise the Patriarch came out of 
the Sepulcher, holding at arm’s length his 


P41] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


two cornucopias, flaming like huge torches. 
The little lane was invaded by the mob, but 
the English officers made a way for him, as 
brutally as if they were defending the man 
who carries the ball in a football match. And 
then, on the dusty roof of the Holy Sepul- 
cher, in the midst of the ex-votos, lamps and 
painted wooden flowers, an Armenian monk 
jumped up and began an extravagant dance, 
waving his candles about his bearded face, 
and thus purifying himself in the Sacred 
Fire. An English officer saw him and ap- 
peared also on the Tomb, more out of place 
there in his khaki uniform than the Armenian 
dancer. As an Englishman his conception of 
religious enthusiasm was, no doubt, different 
from the Armenian’s! He collared the monk, 
and with the gesture of Punch beating the 
policeman pushed him down the stairs into 
the throng where both of them disappeared. 

Darkness reigned again. To avoid one of 
those fires which have destroyed the church 
many times in the course of centuries, the 
policemen had ordered the candles to be put 


[22] 


THE SACRED FIRE 


out. Only a few survived, here and there, like 
will-o’-the-wisps. A disgusting smell of bad 
wax and smoke filled the basilica. In the re- 
newed darkness, the Holy Sepulcher shone 
with all its candles, all its lamps and above, 
under the cupola, I saw the sun-ray again. 
Meanwhile, the fire was flying on its way to 
Bethlehem, to Hebron and to Nazareth. In 
carriages and on horseback they were racing 
to see who would bring the Holy Fire first to 
their coreligionists. When the Russians used 
to come, a ship under steam, waited for the 
runner in Jaffa. As soon as the Sacred Fire 
was aboard, she started on her journey. 
Without a stop, she went to Odessa, where 
thousands of people with small lanterns se- 
cured the precious light, which they, in their 
turn, distributed to all the icons of Russia. 
The ceremony was at anend. I found my- 
self lost again in the mysteries of the stair- 
case. I reached the bottom and found my- 
self among the crowd and the blown-out can- 
dles. The ferruled stick of my gorgeously 
dressed guide, who preceded me, opened the 


[ 23 1 


MN a OAM AN GS Oo RN SS Bie Oe AT pd od Bs BY A 08 es 


way easily. In the Orient, a stick with a 
silver knob striking the ground authorita- 
tively, a gold-embroidered coat and sky-blue 
knickers will always bring about miracles. 
Another stone staircase straighter than a lad- 
der and we came out in sight of the sky, on 
the roof of the basilica, and found ourselves 
in the midst of another crowd, which in the 
daylight appeared to be the transfiguration 
of the somber crowd below. This crowd was 
singing too, singing words with a savage 
rhythm, which sounded like the breathing of 
an Oriental holiday crowd. Some young men 
armed with shields and curved sabers were 
mimicking a war-dance, striking their shields 
and twirling their sabers, while every one 
around applauded rhythmically and followed 
their gyrations enthusiastically. Gladiators’ 
games on the roof of the great sanctuary of 
Christian devotion! The pagan fire-festival 
merged with the celebration of Christ’s resur- 
rection was received by these people with the 
same enthusiasm, the same games, the same 
shouts which accompanied the festival of the 


GAA 


THE SACRED FIRE 


Sun God in ancient times. Nothing disap- 
pears altogether, everything endures, even 
though apparently changed. A God dies to 
save men,to make them all brothers, and on 
his tomb the sons of this earth can worship 
him only with the outworn thoughts he came 
to destroy! 

The music and the shouting went on. The 
four gladiators, excited by the colorful crowd, 
continued their war-dance with a growing 
exultation. The tall bonnets of the Greek 
monks moved among the turbans and the fez. 
Along the wall groups of women in bright- 
colored dresses looked like branches of wis- 
teria. F’rom the stone balcony surrounding 
a neighboring minaret, some Mohammedan 
women were looking at this Christian festi- 
val, enjoying the games and applauding to 
encourage the dancers. A sharp tinkling as 
of innumerable small bells filled the air. 
Could this noise come from invisible goats? 
No, it was made by the sellers of orangeade, 
rose-water or simply fresh water, who drew 
attention to their cooling wares by striking 


[ 25 1 





TONE XT EA ON ee US 4 Ba? 


copper goblets against each other. And all 
the time, on the roads of Palestine, the small 
flames lighted in the darkness of the Tomb 
were being carried through the arid country- 
side, over the blue rocks and the burning 
sand. 

What time was it? I did not know. An 
hour from the pit of ages, an hour from the 
oldest of the suns. One thing was certain, 
that the dinner-bell at the hostelry of the 
Assumptionist fathers had rung a long time 
ago. But no dinner-bell could have made me 
leave this extraordinary roof. I let myself 
be carried along by the mob, through a laby- 
rinth of cupolas, vaults and terraces, to the 
inner recesses of a dark chapel where candles 
had just been lighted from the Sacred Fire, 

and there I came across some swarthy priests 
who looked like sorcerers, brothers, I suppose, 
of Balthasar, the Wise Man of the East. 
Within these walls, where each Christian rite 
has its sanctuary, this isolated chapel on the 
roof was reserved for the Abyssinian church. 
Just as I arrived in this cramped space the 


ee 


THE SACRED FIRE 


Abyssinians were celebrating in the open air 
on the terrace above the chapel where Saint 
Helen discovered the wood of the Real Cross. 
The crowd was as dense here as everywhere 
else; above it gilded banners floated, as if they 
were hanging from the sky, and in the cor- 
ner under a great tent, supported on one side 
by the wall, and on the other by two poles, 
I discovered the Abyssinian clergy. Seated 
in a semicircle, the bearded priests, in satin 
robes over which were thrown bright stoles, 
were singing liturgies and chants unlike any- 
thing I have ever heard in churches. In their 
midst the Bishop was seated in an old velvet 
armchair, holding in one hand a lighted can- 
dle and in the other his priestly staff. A curly 
beard whitened his cheeks and his chin. Bal- 
thasar himself! In front of this assembly of 
Wise Men of the East stood a drum, a long 
and narrow drum. ‘The whole gathering 
seemed to be in honor of this drum, which 
stood like an ancient altar, surrounded by the 
brightly dressed priests. 

I stood there as charmed and surprised 


pat] 


SNEXT YEARVIN JERUSALEM” 


as I had been the day I stood in the market- 
place of Marrakech, in front of the snake- 
charmer or the story-teller. I was as fas- 
cinated by them as I had been by the band of 
negro musicians who, in the moonlight at a 
crossroad at Rabat, had brought forth the 
world of subterranean spirits. But the 
Bishop had spied me standing beside my gor- 
geous Kawa. He took me for an important 
personage, signaled to me, left his armchair, 
invited me to take his place, thrust his candle 
into my hand and sat down modestly on a 
chair beside me. I wondered if he also in- 
tended to give me his priestly staff! Once I 
entered a synagogue in Galicia when they 
were celebrating the Feast of the Law. On 
that day the Holy Scrolls in their velvet 
sheaths with their silver bells are taken out 
from the tabernacle. They are carried around 
the synagogue to the singing of joyful hymns, 
and how beautiful these hymns are, how di- 
vinely joyful! To honor me (they had taken 
me for a Jew) the beadle gave me one of the 
Sacred Scrolls, and I can see myself still 


[ 28 7 


THE SACRED FIRE 


with my Thora on my arms, turning around 
the almemar, while the crowd of Jews pressed 
around me trying to touch the small bells and 
kiss the holy fringes. . . . But this was a still 
stranger experience, sitting on the throne of 
an Abyssinian Bishop, worshipping the tall 
drum together with the priests. Next, fol- 
lowed by my swarthy clergy, holding the 
enormous candle in my hand, I went around 
the terrace, under a blinding light, behind the 
golden banners, amid the shouts, the hurried 
beatings of the drums, surrounded by the 
smell of the tinkling censers swayed to and 
fro by the dark officiants. It was nearly three 
o'clock when the procession ended. The 
Abyssinian and myself came back under the 
tent, I thanked His Grace, gave him back his 
candle and left the roof of the Holy Sepul- 
cher; for as it was the Sabbath, I wanted to 
see the Jews lamenting at the foot of the 
Wall of Wailing, before the first star ap- 
peared in the sky. 


[297] 


AM RRM 
\ aay Fallen 


14 * Rd if 
un Cay) pet Mops Ate 
Hl oak aes 

ane 


\ 


ma 
) trie 





THE WALL OF WAILING 





CHAPTER ITI 
THE WALL OF WAILING 


Tue Jewish quarter was only a stone’s 
throw from the Holy Sepulcher. It seemed 
deserted. Easter was near and, according 
to custom, the Jews had painted a bluish 
white the irregular fantastic walls of their 
small houses, all of which are covered by small 
domes, small stone caps very like the round 
hats they wear. In those narrow stony 
streets, with many vaults, stairs and sharp 
turnings, silence reigned after the continual 
noise which had filled my ears since early 
morning; and what a silence! How restful 
was this crumbling ghetto which looked quite 
abandoned! ‘Titus, Bar-Kochba, the Proph- 
ets, the Holy History, the corner of the 
village church where I learned my catechism, 
some very important moments of my life and 
some very trivial ones came back to me, in 
disorder, pell-mell, to disappear entirely, 


[33] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM”? 


leaving me free to enjoy the present and the 
feeling that I was not a part of the long chain 
of events which had taken place here. Sud- 
denly a strange-looking person appeared 
from one of the side-streets. He was dressed 
from head to foot in a violet velvet garment, 
the color of faded hyacinth; his colorless 
beard harmonized with a bonnet of fawn fur, 
and his dead-white skin, ivory-like, was as 
faded as the velvet of his clothes. Then an- 
other appeared, dressed in green, the green of 
a three-hundred-year-old parrot. ‘Two more, 
one in a cherry-colored caftan, the other 
dressed in crimson velvet which looked as old 
as Jerusalem itself. How strange they 
seemed, dressed in velvet, centuries old, as old 
as the sheaths of the Thora! I had never 
seen such people outside of Venetian pictures. 
The most brilliant as well as the most delicate 
colorings, all the nuances and shades that | 
shine in the “Marriage of Cana.” It was the 
first time that Jewry appeared to me as a 
fairy-tale. Seeing those Jews seeking the 
light, I thought of all I had heard, at Bels, at 


[ea] 





THE WALL OF WAILING 





Zadagora, about the old men who abandon 
their country to come here to die and spend 
eternity in the land of Jerusalem. Was it to 
honor death that they had covered their old 
bones with those charming velvets and silks? 
A tall, dark Jew, dressed in his black Galician 
gabardine, walked among those brilliant or 
delightfully faded robes; he was as somber as 
a candle-snuffer and as lugubrious as Poland 
under a low winter sky. 

In the blue-painted walls doors opened on 
narrow passages or upon stairs leading down 
to interior courts. All Jewish houses are 
sunk in the ground in order to have more 
space, but this side of the hill was so irregular 
that often a court which seemed to be under- 
ground opened straight on a narrow street. 
Down below, I still received an impression of 
seething humanity, an impression that Jewish 
life always gives, and even Jewish death, as 
in the old cemetery in Prague, where the 
tombs climb one on top of the other, elbowing 
each other just as the dead did while still 
alive. But this humanity was full of amia- 


[ 357] 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


bility, inviting me to come down, to look in, 
to enter. The Easter coat of paint had hidden 
for a little while the poverty of their dwell- 
ings, but this momentary brightness only 
made the smell of soured things more notice- 
able, the same smell as that found in the hold 
of a ship which I have always noticed in 
the ghettos I have visited, as if a ghetto 
itself were only an immense vessel of emi- 
grants. In the depths of these deep courts 
one often sees a small synagogue, walled in, 
buried there, doubtless because it is written: 
“T cry out to Thee, O God! from the depths!” 
Dust, poverty and dirt reigns in those cav- 
erns of piety. It is asif a horror of anything 
beautiful, or even of anything agreeable, were 
part of the Jewish worship. The only thing 
that is beautiful, the curtain of embroidered 
velvet which hides the cupboard of the Tho- 
ras, adds to the lamentable impression by 
drawing attention to its beauty. 

I had thought that to find my way to the 
Wall of Wailing I would only have to follow 
the buttercup-colored Jew and the amaranth 


Raga 





THE WALL OF WAILING 


one who went gesticulating side by side, and 
that on a Saturday, at the end of a Sabbath 
day, all the Jews in Jerusalem would be go- 
ing to the Wall of Wailing. I followed them 
at a respectful distance. What on earth were 
they saying to each other? They walked, 
stopped, gesticulated a little more, went on 
their way. A conversation that one cannot 
hear is always full of interest and mystery, 
and I artlessly imagined that if I could un- 
derstand them I would at once learn some- 
thing about that silent quarter of theirs. I 
followed them through the maze of those de- 
scending streets, while other Jews went up, 
brightly or somberly dressed. After all, all 
the Jews of the ghetto were not going to 
the Wall of Wailing. The two I had been 
following entered a synagogue decorated with 
frescoes where one could see lions, gazelles 
and lyres hanging on weeping willows, about 
a hundred figures from Titian and the Vero- 
nese like those I had already met in the 
street were shouting and rocking in the man- 
ner of the Galician Jews. I asked in bad 


P37 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





German where the Wall of Wailing was. No- 
body understood my jargon and everybody 
asked everybody else questions to try to guess 
what I wanted to say. Instantly all the 
prayers stopped as if they did not mean very 
much to them. Instead of the All-Powerful 
who, as I came upon the scene, had been the 
center of interest, I suddenly became the ob- 
ject of attention. Pleasure had come into 
their lives, a happy diversion which must not 
be missed. ‘These old men seeking eternity 
were able to taste the joy of the passing mo- 
ment and make the most of whatever it might 
bring to them, and what fire, what vivacity, 
what petulance were wasted on nothing at 
all! That is the Jewish mind, always ready 
to go from Heaven to earth without transi- 
tion. I was surrounded by a circle of bright 
eyes, which reminded me of those Russian 
pictures in which one sees a sledge stopped in 
the snow surrounded by wolves with shining 
teeth and burning eyes. They all called out 
to one another, each one evidently having his 
own idea of what I wanted. The phrase that 


[38 1] 





THE WALL OF WAILING 


I heard repeated that morning ad nauseam, 
“The Jews are sad! The Jews are sad!’ is 
not true. I saw them there, in their syna- 
gogue, at the center of an isolated universe, 
absolutely indifferent to what was going on 
a few steps away at the Holy Sepulcher, as 
far from Christ’s Tomb as if they were at 
Bokhara or Cracow. This Holy Saturday 
was a day like any other for them; they were 
in their habitual mood, their love of life mixed 
with their violent piety. All around me they 
went on shouting at one another and I was 
unable to understand a word of their Yiddish. 
But what seemed to me more extraordinary 
than anything else was that it did not occur 
to one of those Jews that at that particular 
hour on the Sabbath in Jerusalem I could 
only want one thing, to go to the Wall which 
~ dominates their whole lives, the Wall which 
they had come from afar to seek just as I 
had myself. 


How did I reach it? I cannot tell. No 
one guided me there. I kept going on to- 


Bovis 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





wards it, blindly feeling my way through nar- 
row street after narrow street, and finally I 
believed myself to be really lost between two 
small stone walls about which a smell of 
refuse lingered. Suddenly, as so often hap- 
pens in those Oriental mazes, at a turning of 
this passage leading apparently nowhere, I 
saw some women seated in front of small 
stalls and at the same time I heard a sound, 
made, I soon discovered, by a thousand shrill 
voices. Then I realized that at last I had 
found what I was looking for, and that this 
smelly, narrow way had taken me to the 
legendary Wall, which millions and millions 
of Jews have reached only through the path 
of their dreams. 

Here was the Wall, the great groaning, 
the lamentation of Israel. The wailers were 
there, a small crowd of undersized people, 
hugging the ground, swaying, shouting and 
lamenting at the foot of the high wall. Each 
one groaned in his own way, without paying 
any attention to his neighbor, letting himself 
go, intent only on his own sorrow. I was not 


[407 





PHEW AL EL OF WALLING 





surprised. I had expected something like it, 
or rather, I knew all about it through my 
experiences with the Galician Jews. As soon 
as the scene had imprinted itself upon my 
mind I saw that it could not be otherwise. 
These people in the throes of prayer, more 
anarchical than ever in their sorrow, crowded 
into a scanty space between a small wall 
made of mud and stones, just like the one I 
had passed on my way, and the wall itself 
made of enormous blocks of stone perfectly 
balanced upon each other without any cement 
to hold them together. The shiny, golden, 
weather-beaten wall, greasy where foreheads, 
lips and hands have been touching it through- 
out the centuries, that collection of blocks 
with nothing to break its monotony except 
some plants growing on it here and there, 
that bare and inflexible mass which has sur- 
vived all the calamities which have bruised 
Jerusalem since the beginning of time, that 
wall represents the religion of Israel, bare, 
simple, strong and abstract. Tradition has 
it that those stones are a remnant of the 


[41 J 


SMNBALT OVE AR ODUON JEROSALEM"% 


foundations of Solomon’s Temple. Archeol- 
ogists give other explanations. But why 
bother about archeology? Whether the Wall 
was built by Jewish hands or whether it was 
built long before the Hebrews took posses- 
sion of Judea, what does it matter? It sus- 
tains something greater than Solomon’s pal- 
ace, the undying hope of Israel that its de- 
feat is not eternal, that its days of glory will 
come back. 

At the entrance of the passage the women, 
draped in their flowered shawls, their heads 
covered with handkerchiefs, were moaning 
softly. I saw some who caressed the Wall 
slowly and gently with their old hands, sob- 
bing the while. A young girl was crying 
bitterly, pillowing her pale face upon the 
cold stone. Was it possible that any one 
so young and charming as she could cry 
over a dead stone, or over the idea, deader 
still, of a temple ruined nearly two thousand 
years ago? What was her sorrow? Why 
did she despair? Was she trying to ward off 
some unhappiness? I felt that those stones 


[42 1 





THE WALL OF WAILING 





could do nothing for her, except help her to 
cry. Carried away by the sorrow of their 
mothers and sisters, the children were crying 
too. Further away, with their prayer-scarves 
on, their beards and their long noses bent 
upon their psalm-books, the men in silk and 
velvet and the men in black caftans were 
moving about, bending down, getting up, el- 
bowing their way nearer to the Wall, so that 
they could rest their foreheads and _ their 
hands on it, and read their prayers nearer to 
it. I felt keenly the contrast between those 
ancient stones which will last a long time yet 
and all the old men who to-morrow, maybe 
to-day, will lie down for eternity in the valley 
of Josaphat. But after all they are eternal 
themselves in their way. They have taken the 
place of other old men, as old as they are, 
who once prayed there and others exactly 
alike will in turn replace them. Of their wild 
sorrow how much is habit, how much real 
emotion? I had been admiring one of the 
Abrahams who was groaning louder than the 
rest, one of those sad, old men whom the 


[43] 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





Greeks had been mocking in the morning at 
Christ’s Tomb. Suddenly he stopped to 
scratch his shoulder where some insect was 
biting him, then, relieved, he returned at once 
to his accustomed gestures, his inextinguish- 
able sorrow. 

The passer-by happening upon this scene, 
not knowing anything of the feelings which 
animate this strange gathering, would only 
see in this high Wall a ruin like many other 
ruins on the Phenician coast, and all the 
wailers would be only a picturesque and 
mad mob such as one finds constantly in the 
Orient. The gesticulations, the shouts, the 
swayings, the phrases repeated eternally on 
the same monotonous rhythm are the same. 
But there is something more than in the dance 
of a Mohammedan crowd on a square in Mo- 
rocco, something great, the flame of a desire, 
which, seen or unseen, lives in the heart of 
Israel, expresses itself and increases in 
front of this Wall. I had felt it, a long time 
ago, in Galicia. Yes, in the imagination of 
a Jew in Eastern Europe, the love of Zion 


[44] 


THE WALL OF WAILING 


exists. The heart of the scattered people has 
never ceased to sigh for the Holy City of 
David! May we meet next year in Jeru- 
salem! It is the hopeful wish they have 
been repeating every year since the fall of 
the Temple, every Easter, in all the places 
in the world where Fate has thrown them. 
The Occidental Jews may add some of the 
bitter irony so natural to their race to this 
wish thousands of years old; but in the ghet- 
tos of Russia, Poland and Roumania, the 
wish is full of sincerity, full of an astonish- 
ingly strong hope! In the midst of the, 
harshness of the Law and of the Talmud, in 
small houses on the edge of a Carpathian tor- 
rent, or on a plain in Poland, Jerusalem 
raises its domes and its palaces with all the 
radiant splendor that nostalgia can conceive. 
Each morning, in their prayer, this appeal 
goes up to the Lord: “Blow the trumpet of 
our deliverance, O Lord God, set up our ban- 
ner to assemble our scattered brethren, gather 
them from the four corners of the earth, come 
back full of loving-kindness to Thine own 


E45] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


City of Zion and reign over it, as Thou hast 
promised us. Build it up again and establish 
it for ever. Be praised, O Lord, Thou wilt 
set up Jerusalem again!” 

In those Jewish settlements I had heard 
many times how the miracle will take place. 
The Messiah will appear mounted on a white 
horse. As in ancient times the Red Sea di- 
vided, so will the rivers divide in front of 
the people of Israel. Bridges of cigarette- 
paper more solid than those made of steel 
will enable the Hebrews to pass over the 
oceans as lightly as shadows, and a thousand 
other miraculous details are told which 
shorten the cold evenings of exile. It was an 
ordinary occurrence to see there the old men 
who had for sixty years and more cherished 
their longing for Jerusalem, as shown in that 
ancient wish, “Oh, to be next year in Jeru- 
salem!” deciding to leave their relatives, their 
friends, the villages where they spent their 
lives, to go on this remarkable journey. 
When old people are nearing their end they 
often have the desire to be elsewhere, to go 


[487 





THE WALL OF WAILING 


away, to flee, to escape the death which is 
waiting for them. 

But the old Hebrews who venture on the 
road to Zion believe that dying in Palestine 
makes eternal life certain. All the sacred 
books say that four steps in the Land of their 
Ancestors cleanse from all sins. Living in 
the shadow of the walls of Zion brings as 
many benefits from the Lord as fulfilling 
rigorously the six hundred and thirteen com- 
mandments. This journey also satisfies their 
natural pride to an astonishing degree. A 
poor cobbler out of work, a tailor who can no 
longer see to sew, whose clients are leaving 
him, all those who, because of their age, are 
becoming public charges, become suddenly 
people of importance when going to Jeru- 
salem. In a single day they enter a holy 
kingdom, they become ambassadors of their 
villages; but this is not all; they become the 
representatives of all Israel to the Almighty, 
who listens with far more favor if the prayers 
of the Jews come from his ruined ‘Temple! 
Amid praises and blessings they leave Po- 


Dar 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


Jand, Hungary and Russia, taking with them 
only enough money for their journey, their 
talliths, their phylacteries and prayer-books. 

In Jerusalem, a pious man has no need to 
worry about ways and means of living. Are 
there not all the Jews in the world, who are 
unable to leave the place of their exile, to 
support the delegates of the scattered People, 
the holy ambassadors who spend their days 
sending Jewish prayers to the Lord God 
from the foot of the Holy Hill where David 
used to offer sacrifices unto the Lord? If 
these old men were not there, crying at the 
foot of the Wall, if, when by chance, the Lord 
looked at His beloved Zion, which has been 
abandoned to the pagans, if He did not see, 
here and there, a Jew with an old beard, an 
old hat, an old caftan, all the things that 
soften His heart; if, for one day only, He 
could say, “There is not one solitary Jew in 
My beloved Zion, they have truly abandoned 
Me,” calamities and plagues would befall 
Israel. But the old men are there, wailing all 
the time. Just as the angel held back Abra- 


Dae 


einen ete on apace gape a 
Ce AeA OF WAL ENG 





ham’s knife from Isaac’s head, so their be- 
loved presence softens the anger of the Lord 
and prevents His arm from leaning too heay- 
ily on His forgetful chosen people. Well 
then! Since these old men of Israel assume 
the task of appeasing Jehovah, of calming 
His outraged spirit; since, thanks to their in- 
tervention, unlimited blessings fall like 
manna on all the scattered People, how can 
they be expected to do anything, to lose a 
single precious moment in the sordid business 
of earning money? Women can have shops, 
sell candles, ounces of sugar, corn or coal, 
that is quite as it should be. Who cares what 
the women do? The Lord God Himself 
never cared. But the men, the men here, have 
only to cry and moan; for the rest, they de- 
pend upon Israel’s charity. 

It may seem absurd that Moses’ people 
have only been able to express their deep 
poetic quality in this gathering of old men 
and women who looked as if they were 
dressed in the discarded costumes of some 
bankrupt theater. But the most beautiful 


[49] 


NaN ea Een Ak UR IN ae Se Oi aay a Te 


thing I saw was that poverty. If Israel, rich 
and powerful, had tried to do something mag- 
nificent, it would have been banal. Is it not 
greater and more in keeping with its destiny 
that it should be represented in Zion by peo- 
ple in rags and by beggars? ‘The Jew is here 
as we see him in his hidden settlements in 
Oriental Europe and in the poor quarters of — 
London and New York. He would be de- 
ceiving Jehovah once again if he tried to 
make Him believe that he thinks only of Him 
when success and wealth come. When Israel 
is doing well it thinks very little about the 
Lord. But it always appeals to Him when it 
is poor and oppressed. In sending to the 
Wall some of its poor members, it wants to 
show God its pitiable state, to keep Him from 
forgetting the promises of power arid happi- 
ness which He made to them years and years 
ago. | 
I did not understand any of the prayers 
which went up all around me with a growing 
intensity as the evening approached, but they 
probably said: “For two thousand years we 


E50 


TOE AG Le O BO WaT ot NG 


have been faithful to Thee, for two thousand 
years we have loved Thee and had confidence 
in Thee, O Lord, for two thousand years we 
have appealed to these stones which have re- 
mained cruelly silent. Surely that is some- 
thing! Look! Our hearts have not changed! 
Our thoughts always come back, O God, to 
the hill where David saw Thine angel with his 
shining sword. We mourn when we are far 
from Thy house where we have worshipped 
Thee. We ask Thee with tears and suppli- 
cation to bring us back here soon. We la- 
ment here because Thy Temple has been 
destroyed and Thy Beautiful City lost.” 
Behind this prayer, I detected the eternal 
Jewish uneasiness, their dissatisfaction, their 
desire to be something else, their appeal for 
other temples, for ideal societies where the 
whole of humanity would be ruled by them. 
The strong hope of reigning over the uni- 
verse that Israel has always had was ridicu- 
lous and touching at the same time when ex- 
pressed with such incongruous strength by 
these poor samples of the scattered race. 


Poi] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


After all, is not such deep despair the great- 
est proof of faith? Underneath all this de- 
spair, their complaints were full of happiness, 
of the confidence the Chosen People have 
in themselves, the sign by which we always 
know them. One burst of the trumpets was 
enough to pull down the walls of Jericho; 
surely so many tears will end by rebuilding 
the Holy City. 

In front of the great, bare Wall, where 
nothing rests the eyes, any kind of words are 
of no avail. I said to myself that it was un- 
likely that the Temple would rise up again 
under my eyes to-night. I began to tire of 
all the pious shoutings which had been filling 
my ears since morning, with the most diverse 
tongues, with the most diverse thoughts. I 
had had enough for one day! The chanting 
of the Orthodox Christians, the drum of the 
Abyssinians, the wailing of the Jews! Some 
wailers closed their prayer-books, separated 
themselves from the mob and went away, — 
satisfied to have moaned, to have fulfilled a 
function of Israel. ‘The others went on, their 


[52] 


THE VWACL OF “KhWALLIN G 


moaning increased. Would the sight of the 
evening star, late in making its appearance, 
stop the fanatics? 

I tried to reach the other end of the infernal 
passage with the hope of finding a way which 
would take me up above the Wall, to the 
esplanade where the Temple once stood, 
the Temple that the moaning voices were 
beseeching the Lord to erect once more with 
His own hands. I made my way through 
the wailing crowd with difficulty. At last I 
reached the end of the passage. But I might 
have known that it would be impossible for a 
wish, however humble, to have a chance of 
being fulfilled in this place of eternal desola- 
tion. The passage I had found was a blind 
alley. I had to go back, I had to make my 
way again through the lamenting mob. At 
last I managed to get out of this extraor- 
dinary place. One of the crouching women 
offered me a small posy, made up of two 
jasmine flowers and of some blades of grass 
from the Wall. I wanted to give her some 
pennies but she refused them. It was Sat- 


Beep 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


urday and on a Saturday a Jew cannot give 
or receive money. So on that day beggars 
become givers in their turn and they give 
away lemons and small posies. With my two 
flowers in my hand, I went through the ruined 
labyrinth, as evil-smelling as before, which I 
had followed on my way to the Wall. But 
this time it appeared in a new guise to me; 
it was an ideal way to lead to the Wall of 
Wailing, the poverty-stricken way which 
leads to that impasse of misery, that cul-de- 
sac of hope. 


us dl 


THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


ete wet 
AY sii a ROR T ed Ca 
al ‘ $3, a ‘i 
> v) ' j 
SINC aM 


Ret aay 
f 


a) 
He fg 


7 
‘#} 


i’ Fi 





CHAPTER III 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


A LONG passage, already dark, as imposing 
as a stone bridge, where, in spite of the night 
which had begun to envelop it, I guessed at 
small shops hiding in the wall, on the left 
and the right, with windows through which 
could be seen bright lights, small, moldy 
patches and strange fragments of statuary 
mixed with the vegetation that grows on 
ruins. At the end, an open space, a golden 
light, some olive and cypress trees, an empti- 
ness hardly broken by the presence of small 
buildings, kiosks, tombs, fountains—I could 
not exactly see all that was there—a wide, 
white staircase, shining softly in the twilight, 
and above all that, on the spot where once 
stood the Temple in which the angry God 
of the Jews used to receive the blood of sac- 
rifices, stands a kiosk of turquoises and dia- 
monds, covered with green mosses, a kiosk 


[ov 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


of changing colors, as bright as a blue-jay. 
Taken by surprise I stopped on the dilapi- 
dated steps, the prisoner of invisible spirits 
dancing around me; I seemed to hear their 
divine Jaughter. 

Here, too, people were praying. This bril- 
liant azure palace contains, besides its sculp- 
tures and its mosaics, covered with multicol- 
ored birds, the Sakra, the sacred rock on 
which God stopped Abraham’s knife when 
he was about to strike Isaac, and from which 
Mohammed was brought into God’s pres- 
ence. Through the open doors, under some 
lamps, I could see the faithful bowing and 
getting up with movements not unlike those 
of the Jews, if gestures executed with seren- 
ity and nobility can in any way recall those 
performed in a frenzy. But the Mohamme- 
dan prayer asks nothing from God. It is 
simply a greeting to Him, just enough to 
show that He is always present and that men’s 
thoughts are still climbing the ladder of light 
which has been standing there, between 
heaven and earth, ever since Jacob’s time. 


pe a 


THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


I did not expect for a moment that in this 
place, where the Tablets of the Law had stood, 
with all that they signify, threats, punish- 
ments, thwarted life, I would find the most 
beautiful expression of the pure joy of living 
that exists in the Orient, perhaps in the 
world. In vain I kept trying to remember 
that this was the threshing-ground which 
David bought from Ornan for six hundred 
pieces of gold, the site of the Jewish tragedy, 
the place chosen by God, where the voice of 
Jesus was heard—the charm of this delightful 
spot drove all such thoughts away. What a 
break with the past, which had been replaced 
by a striving towards things that the Law had 
tried to suppress. Just as a long troubled 
human life finds a haven some day, so this 
place had achieved a perfect peace. ‘Tired 
of trying to attain the treasures stored up in 
Heaven which are too hard to reach, its ad- 
vice to the pilgrim is to love the pleasures of 
this life, but to love them lightly, with the 
lightness of the olive-branch, to renounce the 
unattainable, too, in the way which the Orient 


[59 


UNE YUE Ave DUN yd ie 20 SA, Foe 


has of giving up when the path is hard, to be 
resigned in the face of disappointments, to 
be content with whatever happiness is with- 
in easy reach. The lamentations at the Wall 
of Wailing were still in my ears; by shutting 
my eyes I could still see the tear-stained faces, 
the backs bent by centuries of misery, the 
long, inconsolable beards, the hands eager to 
seize happiness but finding only hard and 
smooth stones. 

Here I was, a few steps above the lament- 
ing old men, in a divine place, a paradise 
where not one of them would have dared to 
venture. ‘The Mohammedans would not per- 
mit it, and the Jews themselves do not want 
it, for by going up there, they walk in 
the Holy of Holies which only the High 
Priest has the right to enter. Brought from 
so far away by their desire for Zion, they 
come up against the Wall and remain in the 
ditch to moan. And what are they asking, 
O God! That the most beautiful spot in the 
world (yes, a spot as beautiful as a dream) 
should disappear, also like a dream, through 


Bae 


THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


a dreadful miracle. O God, do not listen to 
them! Do not heed the prayers of your Jews! 
Let them lament and moan; they live for it 
and love doing it! Do not rebuild the Tem- 
ple, do not allow any one to touch this en- 
chanted place! ... 

I walked around the high esplanade over 
the dusty grass. On one side I could see the 
mass of mildewed cupolas, yellowed here and 
there by the rust of ages, and the old Jeru- 
salem, looking like a herd of cattle going 
down a hill; on the other, the rocky hill of 
the Mount of Olives, and, further off, in the 
distance, the bluish mountains, the Hills of 
Moab, the Dead Sea and the Jordan valley. 
But in this vast space, the imagination is oc- 
cupied more with the sky than with the 
earth. I saw the heavens filled with shining 
ladders, on which angels went up and down, 
their shining forms carried by cherubim; I 
saw clouds where Jehovah appeared in the 
lightning, shining swords, rains of manna; I 
heard sounds of thunder and holy trumpets, 
of threats and promises, pacts and solemn 


p61] 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


engagements, denied and renewed many 
times. Now the scene is empty, desolate, 
forsaken of men and of God. 

The night came and with a light finger 
caused everything to disappear, just as time 
has succeeded in suppressing any vestige of 
the different ideas that have followed one an- 
other in that place. This sacred spot, closed 
in, is like an old palimpsest that men have 
rubbed constantly only to begin writing on 
it again. What has become of the dark room 
where the Ark of the Covenant, the Tablets of 
the Law, Aaron’s rod and the urn containing 
the manna were kept. Not a single trace of 
the Temple or of Solomon’s palace remains, 
nor of the Antonia where St. Paul was impris- 
oned, from which Roman soldiers watched 
the turbulent Jews, always ready to create 
disturbances. Not a trace is left of the Capi- 
tol built by the Emperor Hadrian after the 
revolt of Bar-Kochba and of Reb Akida. 
Here and there the moon lends a certain 
charm to some building lost among the olive- 
trees, the columns and the dome of David’s 


[ 62] 


THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


tribunal that a chain seems to connect with 
the sky, lovely porticoes whose sole purpose 
is to imprison a little of the pale light under 
their arches. Of course, it was the light which 
prevented me from seeing the chain on which 
the Angel Gabriel will hang his scales on the 
Day of Judgment, and between the porti- 
coes the thread, finer than life, sharper than 
a sword, that the Believers will have to cross 
as a supreme test before going to Paradise. 

The beautiful mosque of precious stones 
shone now with a soft green-and-blue ra- 
diance. It seemed as if the air were still 
impregnated with the perfume of the rose- 
water that Saladin’s sister brought from 
Aleppo on eighty camels to purify the place 
which had been made into a church by the 
Crusaders. ‘The ghostly porticoes and the 
gray olive-trees were absorbed by the shad- 
ows, as ghosts which are seen for an instant 
and then disappear for ever. ‘The cypresses 
awaited without uneasiness a night less dark 
than their foliage. Then, I do not know why, 
some dreadful demon came to me with the 


[637 





ts BN OT GY I A OR 2 By SAY Ai ES fie AY cay BL: BS BY ORLY Do 


thought: “Is there, at the foot of the Wall, in 
the blind alley, is there still a voice foolish 
enough to ask for the destruction of all this?” 
And I was foolish enough myself to try to 
see whether it was so. Leaving this moon- 
lit paradise, I went through the gloomy 
labyrinth which led to the Wall. There was 
no one to be seen in the Passage of Tears. 
I went through it from one end to the other, 
surprised that no sobs should come out from 
those stones, for, after all, a wall that has 
been warmed all day by the sun, gives forth 
some heat long after the sun has disappeared ; 
so why not tears? 

It looked as if the Jews of Poland, Russia 
and Roumania, the ghettos of Berlin, Lon- 
don and New York, the Jewry of the world 
in fact, had decided at last never to trouble 
God any more. It was only then in that soli- 
tude that the Wall looked sad. Eiverywhere 
the Jews go they bring intense life. Their 
howling despair is life, their frenzied lamen- 
tations drive away sadness. But silence! a 
silence such as invades a court when plaintiffs 


[ 647 


THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 


and defendants are gone! Beside me, in the 
shadows, I smelt a fig-tree which had its root 
in the Wall. No, the Wall was not abandoned 
after all, Men had left it to itself for a mo- 
ment, but the ancient Biblical tree was giving 
forth its perfume into the darkness just as 
the tiny light in front of the sanctuary was 
carrying on, during the peace of the night, 
the prayers that men had stopped uttering 
for a little while. 


or] 


a 


(| 
i 


aN 


‘i ey 


¥ ad 





THE PROPHET OF THE 
BOULEVARD 


\ t Ay ; ; | 
¥: * ’ ‘4 wie ‘hee i uy 





CHAPTER IV 
THE PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


Wuat had happened during the nizht? 
Had God Tzebaoth brought another miracle 
to pass? Could it be, that in one night He 
had changed the old Jews belonging to past 
ages that I had seen the day before, sobbing 
at the Wall of Wailing, into young men 
dressed in the American manner, with khaki 
shirts, knickers, woolen stockings, alpine 
shoes, with the silk neckerchiefs of the Boy 
Scouts, big felt hats and revolvers in their 
belts? And could the young women be 
Jewesses, too, with their short skirts, their 
sleeveless dresses and their hats covering their 
bobbed hair? I knew them by their faces, 
the young men and women that I met every- 
where that morning. In the quarters of 
the new Jerusalem there were also Jews, 
but Jews of a new kind that I had never 
seen before, more surprising to me in this 
unexpected garb, than the caftaned Jewry 


[697 


EN EXT OY BAR IN SP Eh OSA Dae 


living in the narrow streets of the old Jeru- 
salem. These are the haloutzim, the pioneers, 
the Levites of the new Zion, who want to 
bring back to the ancestral home the ancient 
Kingdom of David, and while looking at 
them I thought of the strange series of events 
which had brought them here. 

About the year 1895, one met in the cafés 
on the boulevard where the journalists used 
to gather, a man about forty years old, a 
good-looking Semite with black eyes and an 
Assyrian beard, who had nothing of the ghet- 
to about him. His name was Herzl, Doctor 
Theodore Herzl, correspondent in Paris of 
the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. He came 
from Budapest and he was a Jew, if learn- 
ing as a child a little Jewish history, a few 
words of Hebrew and remembering some far- 
away Easter evening or a Purim’s feast 
make one a Jew. ‘The secondary school and 
the university had carried away all that, and 
if some traces of the Jew were left by that 
time, traveling through Europe, meeting dif- 
ferent people and mixing with different so- 


por 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


cieties had wiped them out. From Paris, Dr. 
Herzl sent political or literary articles to his 
paper, or else he was writing light plays in 
the boulevard manner, which were acted in 
Vienna and Berlin. In brief, in the evening 
between four and five, at the Café Napolli- 
tain, he could sincerely believe himself to be 
a real Parisian. 

But he discovered one day that he was 
deeply Jewish. The Dreyfus affair brought 
home to him something he had forgotten, that 
a Jew, however detached from the old cus- 
toms, remains always, among the nations 
where Fate obliges him to live, different from 
other people, some one against whom the old 
hatred is always ready to flare up. Should he 
resign himself, disappear, become humble and 
inconspicuous, or should he fight and pro- 
test? To give in is cowardly and stupid! 
But what is the use of protesting? ‘The 
experience of centuries proved to him that it 
was useless. There is a Jewish problem, and 
nothing that has been done for the last two 
thousand years has ever helped to solve it. 


Pay 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


Violence and unfavorable laws have suc- 
ceeded only in isolating Israel among the 
other nations, keeping it always the same, 
often against its own desire. By an unlucky 
fatality, tolerance and emancipation give a 
very different result from the one expected. 
In any country where the Jews are freely 
allowed the full play of their talents, their 
success has always excited jealousy and ag- 
gravated the hatred that it was supposed 
would disappear with more liberal measures. 
What can be done? What is the remedy for 
this ancient illness of both Jews and Chris- 
tians? Since the Jews are, among other peo- 
ples, a kind of foreign growth which disturbs 
the national life; since they themselves are not 
perfectly at ease, because they feel in them- 
selves something different, which cannot, 
which will not disappear, the best thing is to 
renounce for all time the hospitality of other 
nations, to free them of an unwelcome race; 
therefore, it would be best to find somewhere, 
in Palestine or elsewhere, a place where the 
scattered people could find, at last, peace, 


[72 J 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


security and happiness; a country where they 
could lead their own life, like the other races 
of the world. Once more, the thing to do 
was what Moses had done, bring the Chosen 
People out of exile. But the task of the 
Great Ancestor can be compared to the new 
enterprise only as an old-fashionec opera can 
be compared to a modern lyrical drama. 
Herzl wanted to play the same melodies, but 
with many more instruments, more flutes, 
harps, violins, brasses. He wanted a new 
stage-setting and more magnificent choruses, 
and was carried away by his enthusiasm, very 
astonishing! in a writer of farces (but passion 
and irony can live quite peacefully in a Jew- 
ish heart). He wrote a pamphlet of about one 
hundred pages to show how he desired to 
bring about the wholesale migration of his 
race. 

The role of Israel’s guide, which Moses as- 
sumed in ancient times, would be held to-day 
by a society of disinterested Jews, accus- 
tomed to great undertakings, who would be 
diplomats representing the Hebrew nation 


Este 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





before the other nations and do all that was 
necessary to obtain a territory. Another so- 
ciety, quite different in character, chartered 
like the English companies, would liquidate 
the property of the emigrants in the countries 
they left and thus those who left behind them 
houses or estates would find, at the end of 
the exodus, possessions to compensate them 
for their loss. Work would be found for those 
who had nothing. Naturally they would be 
the first to go. They are excellent material, 
the poor of Israel! No great enterprise suc- 
ceeds unless it springs from a great despair. 
They would be the pioneers, they would build 
houses, start towns, make roads. ‘The bour- 
geoisie would follow them, attracted by a life 
of greater ease in a country full of hope. 

But it is harrowing to leave the country, 
even though an unfriendly one, to which one 
is attached by many memories, made one’s 
own through births and deaths. . Well, the 
cradles could be taken away, and the tombs 
have been abandoned before, in emigrating 
from one inhospitable country to another. 


Dia 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


The bitterness of the new exodus would be 
taken care of, a long time beforehand, by 
prayers and practical lectures, to prepare the 
souls and bodies of the future emigrants for 
their difficult enterprise. The departures 
would take place in groups of families and 
friends, having as their heads trusted men 
elected by each group. ‘Thus, during the 
long journey, they would go on living with 
friends and that would help to drive home- 
sickness away. The groups, being large 
enough, would be able to charter whole trains, 
whole boats. There would be only one class, 
because on a sea-passage it is difficult to put 
up with differences, and though the journey 
would not be precisely a pleasure trip, every- 
body would have to be humored. At their 
destination the emigrants would be received, 
not with wild cheering, but solemnly and so- 
berly. ‘They would have so many trials and 
labors in front of them. Then each one 
would go to the place destined for him, and a 
life forgotten for two thousand years would 
begin again for the Jews, on Jewish soil, pro- 


D7 1 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


tected by a new Jewish flag. It would not be 
decorated with the lion of Judea, nor with 
Aaron’s rod, nor with the seven-branched 
candlestick, nor with any of the old emblems, 
but it would bear on its silk the sign under 
which a people born anew intends to con- 
quer its home, seven gold stars, which in 
Herzl’s mind symbolized seven working- 
hours—one less than any other race. 

The ancient Messianic feeling was at the 
back of this plan, but it was hardly recogniz- 
able, it was so much swamped by the argu- 
ments of business men, sociologists and law- 
yers. There was nothing in it of the old Jew- 
ish misery, nothing of an appeal to Jehovah. 
The great longing for the ancestral land, 
which always dwells in Israel’s heart, became 
a diplomatic matter, an enterprise of emigra- 
tion, a banking transaction. What had been 
for a long time only a desire of the soul, 
a sentimental dream, became with Herzl a 
workable measure. The return to a country 
of their own became a burning question, 
which was agitated in the newspapers and in 


Dba 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


congresses of all kinds. He gave to a mysti- 
cal thought the realistic touch, the touch of 
earth which belongs to things humanly pos- 
sible. Many Jews, especially the revolution- 
ary Russian Jews, adhered willingly to the 
new faith. It was much less dangerous than 
the Revolution in Russia and yet it also 
brought them some hope. 

At that time I remember I was traveling 
in Poland, discovering with intense astonish- 
ment the very quaint life of Galician ghettos. 
One evening, when I had just witnessed in 
the small town of Bels one of those extraor- 
dinary banquets at which all the Jews of the 
place are gathered around the Miracle-W ork- 
ing Rabbi, I was approached in the snow by a 
very lanky, poverty-stricken looking young 
man. Instead of the caftan, worn by every- 
body, he was vaguely dressed in Kuropean 
clothes, and vague was the French in which 
he asked to have the great honor of exchang- 
ing a few words with me. Shortly afterwards 
I found myself with him in my room at the 
inn, lighted by a single candle. 


a ad 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


He said: “Sir, I have been observing you 
for about a week. Here, as you know, we 
have nothing else to do but to watch the peo- 
ple who happen to be passing and, when there 
are no strangers, to spy on one another. I 
hesitated a long time before talking to you, 
but I could not resist my impulse. You have 
been spending a week among hypocrites and 
madmen. The Miracle-Working Rabbi who 
is the center of everything here is an execrable 
man. He lives on our poverty and no one 
resents it. Ah! if he were a scholar, it would 
be a different matter, but he is an ignoramus, 
who knows absolutely nothing, neither the 
Law, the Talmud nor even the Kabbala, 
which he thinks he knows. But he is a 
miracle-monger. Some believe in them, oth- 
ers pretend to believe in them. People are 
living here on stupidity and les. I am 
ashamed for the Jews. Everything you have 
seen, Sir, must have disgusted you.” 

That young man had approached the 
wrong person. It is not every day that one 
discovers a new world; the exaltation, fever, 


Betdt 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 





the bizarre mysticism, the library of Bibles, 
Talmud and Zohar, the Miracle-Working 
Rabbi with his blind eye and the beard of a 
prophet, the pious feasts on Saturdays with 
their songs and alcoholic breaths. Was this 
interfering person trying to spoil all that for 
me? 

“If I understood you correctly, I gather 
that you are not very happy in Bels; tell me, 
where would you be happy?” 

Then, for the first time, in that lost little 
town, I heard the name of Dr. Herzl, and 
evidently the young man had the same blind 
admiration for him that the rest of the town 
felt for the Miracle-Working Rabbi. With 
the quickness of his race in seeing a dream as 
an accomplished fact he saw himself already 
in the Ancestors’ country, rebuilding the an- 
cient Kingdom of David. I listened to him 
amazed, because the enthusiasm he showed 
for that idea appeared more extravagant to 
me than anything I had seen in Bels. The 
mystical appeal to everlasting Zion, the faith 
in the Messiah who would some day unite all 


p79 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


the scattered Jews in the New Temple, was 
not unreasonable. It was a dream-possibility, 
just like a very ancient custom, an old ex- 
pression of desire, a sigh for the unattainable. 
But how could any one believe seriously 
that without Jehovah’s help unknown minis- 
ters of Foreign Affairs and rich bankers were 
going to bring to pass a miracle, the giving 
of Palestine to the Jews? How was any one 
to believe that Abdul Hamid, Commander of 
the Faithful, would for a sum of money, how- 
ever big, abandon Jerusalem where the 
Mosque of Omar stands, the most sacred spot 
in the world for Moslems, after Medina and 
Mecca? How could any one believe that the 
Christian nations would view favorably a 
Jewish guard of honor around the Holy 
Sepulcher? How could any one believe that — 
the British government would accept in Pal- 
estine triumphant Judaism, the effect of 
which would be to increase the power and 
the pride of the Jews remaining in Russia? 
How could any one imagine that the Jews of 
France, Germany, England or America, who 


[ 807] 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


were sincerely attached to their adopted 
countries, would be imprudent enough to 
claim a new one? While the people of Bels, 
with their sordid exaltation, appeared to me 
to have found a sure way to happiness, I pit- 
ied this excited young man, with his sublime 
confidence in those chimerical hopes which 
would not remain dreams. 

It is always wrong, however, to throw 
water on any enthusiasm. Outside, in the 
holy town of Bels, there were plenty of sour 
dispositions and enough mud and snow to 
put a shadow on the heart of this poor 
young man. I kept my thoughts to myself; 
I let him go away with his treasure of hope, 
clutching to his breast some greasy old He- 
braic newspapers, where one could see photo- 
graphs of Jews in morning-coats or business- 
suits, who, in London, in America or else- 
where were fighting for the Great Idea... . 

The new Prophet of the Jews soon knew 
all the tribulations which have been attached 
from time immemorial to this old trade of 
Israel. The Rabbis in charge of the congre- 


[81] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


gations of Western Europe did not have 
anything in common with this businesslike 
Messiah, who led the life of a Gentile and had 
the audacity to substitute himself for Tze- 
baoth as the rebuilder of Jerusalem. ‘The 
great Jewish bankers remained deaf to his 
appeals. Neither Baron Hirsch, who favored 
establishing colonies in Argentine, nor Baron 
Edmund de Rothschild, who, at great ex- 
pense to himself, kept up the Palestine col- 
onies, intended to change their plans and fol- 
low this new Moses. An anonymous group 
donated some millions, but, considering the 
immense amounts that are required in these 
hard times for the humblest miracles, it was 
a paltry sum indeed! Herzl could not hope 
to buy back Palestine from the Commander 
of the Faithful with baksheesh. He saw 
Abdul Hamid twice. The first time Abdul 
Hamid gave him the Order of Medjidie and 
a diamond pin. The second time he was of- 
fered the right of founding in Asia Minor 
some scattered colonies without the privilege 
of linking them together. Failure was in- 
evitable. ‘The Viennese doctor began to see 


[82] 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 





that the political realism he was so proud of 
was after all rather short-sighted. Luckily, 
just at that time, Chamberlain, the English 
Prime Minister, who had some drops of He- 
brew blood in his veins, was visiting Uganda. 
Seeing those deserted regions, he thought of 
Dr. Herzl, whom he had met in London, and 
of his great plan for the wholesale migration 
of the Israelites. The British Government let 
him know that England would be pleased to 
have the Jews settle in Uganda. Of course, 
East Africa was not Palestine, Uganda was 
not Zion, but since the great exodus appeared 
to be so far distant, might not a temporary 
refuge be created, a place where the Chosen 
People could experiment with self-govern- 
ment and try their hand at agricultural life? 
Herzl seized upon the idea, but alas! he had 
forgotten what his Jews were like. I don’t 
think he had ever understood that the en- 
thusiasm he aroused among the intellectuals 
of the ghettos had nothing to do with his 
personality or even with his ideas, but was 
due to the passionate longing which sweeps 
Israel off its feet whenever Zion is mentioned. 


[83] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


To the Jews of Poland, Roumania and Rus- 
sia, Jerusalem was not an empty symbol, 
the symbol of a state to be founded any- 
where, but an actuality, the object of their 
most cherished desires. In the congress which 
he called annually at Basle, London or some 
other large city, he proposed to those home- 
sick people that instead they go to Uganda, 
and was received with tears and lamentations. 
He was betraying Jerusalem! Instead of 
offering them the Kingdom of Light, he was 
offering them a Kingdom of Night, on the 
Dark Continent. The new Moses must have 
spent some terrible hours with those corelig- 
ionists of his, people of the ghettos whom he 
had never learned to know either in Vienna 
or in Paris! Such noise, such excitement, so 
many hands, so many gestures, so much 
stamping of feet, groaning and sobbing! 
What a lot of hair-splitting, what a lot of 
pish-posh! It is said that on his death-bed, 
in his delirium, the unlucky Prophet saw 
himself in the hands of those savage Jews and 
bathed in a cold sweat he waved his hand 
desperately in an attempt to silence them. 


[84] 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


Herzl realized at last, better than he had 
ever done before, the forces which had carried 
him on, and he gave in to their fury. To calm 
down this howling, gesticulating mob, he 
swore a solemn oath: “May my hand dry up 
if I forget thee, O Jerusalem!” And in 
Uganda, the half-dozen English people who 
were the population of the country, became 
angry, too, at the thought of a Jewish inva- 
sion and protested with petition after 
petition, so that the British government soon 
withdrew an offer which had pleased no one. 


Herz] died after his failure. He was only 
forty-four years of age, but prophets gain 
nothing by becoming old. After his death 
the agitation continued, aided by embittered 
discussions in the newspapers and at the con- 
gresses. Some, faithful to the idea that 
Zionism was the only final solution of the 
Jewish problem, refused to begin migration 
to their ancestral land without having ob- 
tained guarantees of their rights as citizens 
of that land. They argued that without such 
guarantees all the effort expended would 


[ 85 | 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


only establish precariously a few thousand 
subsidized colonists and failure would imperil 
the complete liberation of Israel. Others 
held, on the contrary, that the idea of recon- 
structing a Jewish state in Jerusalem was an 
impractical dream which ought to be aban- 
doned. There were political reasons which 
seemed to make it unlikely that it could ever 
be fulfilled. “And even if Palestine were to 
be given back to Israel? It would be mad- 
ness to think that all the Jews in the world 
could be taken there, for this rather barren 
country could not feed many people and 
moreover all the Jews would not go. The 
thing to do was to assist the departure of 
those who wanted to go, to add to the number 
of settlements, to the institutions of all kinds, 
to create, little by little around Jerusalem, — 
centers of Jewish life which could have a 
good influence on the Jews everywhere, and 
perhaps later, when a great many emigrants 
had taken root again on the land of David 
and shown to the other nations what they 
could do, then it would be time enough to 
claim, in the name of the Jewish people, a 


[86 J 


PROPHET VOR THE BOULEVARD 


country of which they had proven themselves 
worthy. 

The moderate views carried the day and 
the original idea of a separate State of Pales- 
tine was shrinking to such modest propor- 
tions that it was hardly recognizable, when 
suddenly it regained the importance of its 
earlier days. However sure Herzl was, with 
the optimism of his race, that favorable cir- 
cumstances would help his dreams, he could 
hardly have conceived a new kind of deluge, 
an upheaval of the world such as had never 
before been seen, which would, in an almost 
miraculous fashion, make his dreams come 
true. : 


From the beginning of the war, England, 
France and Russia had been trying to decide 
on a division of the loot, resulting from 
the disruption of Turkey, the inevitable 
result of the victory which they hoped for. 
Who would get Palestine? According to 
geography and history, this country was 
part of Syria, which nobody at that time 
thought of getting away from France. How- 


[87] 


SUN ORD ee Ae DING SER OS AT ie D2" 


ever, England could not view the prospect 
of I’rance as her neighbor on the Egyptian 
frontier without uneasiness. She desired to 
create under her protection a mighty Arabic 
Empire which would unite India to the 
Mediterranean, and negotiations had already 
been started with King Hussein with the 
| promise that he would be the sovereign of 
all Arabic-speaking countries. It was rather 
difficult, though, brutally to keep France 
away from the Holy Land which she had 
been guarding since the time of Charle- 
magne. The British government conceded 
the severance of Palestine from Syria. It 
would become a neutral country, adminis- 
tered partly by the French and partly by the 
English. That was only a first step. The 
claims of the Zionists soon gave the English 
a chance to eliminate the French altogether. 

For some time before, the English had been 
organizing propaganda on a large scale to 
claim their right to a country which Israel 
had never ceased to consider its own. In- 
censed at the idea that the land of their 
ancestors could become international, they 


Esa 


PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 


asked that it should become a Jewish country 
under a British protectorate. The several 
hundred or so people who make opinion in 
London received this proposal favorably, 
and they had the best reasons in the world 
not to object to it. In the minds of all 
Jews the world over, England soon assumed 
the role of a disinterested Power intent on 
setting right an injustice two thousand years 
old. England profited greatly by that atti- 
tude, for it is rather advantageous to have the 
money and sympathy of Israel on one’s own 
side. In a little while Mr. Balfour, Minister 
of Foreign Affairs, was submitting to Lord 
Rothschild a proclamation by which Palestine 
was recognized as the ‘““National Home of the 
Jewish people.” But the important London 
Jews, Sir Philip Magnus, M.P., Mr. Cohen, 
Chairman of the Jewish Board of Guardians, 
Sir Moses Montefiore and others, who were 
afraid that their love for their adopted country 
might be doubted, protested against the word 
“National.” The Foreign Office’s zeal for 
Israel’s cause was greater than the zeal of the 
Jews themselves, so the protest went un- 


Reed 


mi ah NP ANN LY ONS BO CR ERNE AOL CAR GIN ID BY BT OR? Mok 


heeded and, having secured President Wil- 
son’s help and the assent of the French, 
a little less enthusiastic than the English, on 
the 2nd of November, 1917, the Foreign 
Office sent to Lord Rothschild a new letter 
whose official text in its diplomatic jargon 
follows: “His Majesty’s Government looks 
with favor on the establishment in Palestine 
of a national home for the Jewish people, and 
it will use its best efforts to facilitate the 
realization of this object, it being clearly 
understood that nothing will be done which 
might be prejudicial in any way to the civil 
and religious rights of non-Jewish communi- 
ties living in Palestine, or to the rights and 
political status enjoyed by the Jews in any 
other countries.” 

Two years later, at Cannes, the Allies 
agreed to an English mandate for Palestine. 
France was definitely excluded from the 
Holy Land. The English had won the diffi- 
cult game. The Jews were entitled to think 
that they had won their game also, so from 
Germany, Poland and Russia thousands of 
them descended upon Jerusalem. 


Verge 


THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 


' en 
ve 
LM a Ae 
Pi 
4 Li ie 


OO vk 


Nel 


Tig alist 


A aN ; aK 
hae Ay if 
an ey i yt 


ay id 


2 


Fy Ree oh 


ye Ate 





CHAPTER V 
THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 


THEIR coming pleased no one, neither the 
Mohammedans nor the Christians, nor the 
Jews already there. | 

“Is our country a desert?” said the 
Mohammedans. “Did Mr. Balfour miracu- 
lously do away by one stroke of his pen with 
the six hundred thousand Arabs who live 
here? We also love this place where we have 
been living for thirteen hundred years; Jeru- 
salem is to us the Queen of Cities, one of the 
four towns of Paradise, of which Mecca, 
Medina and Damascus are the others, but of 
all the sacred spots in the world it is the 
nearest to Heaven. The people who live here 
are neighbors of God and to die in Jerusalem 
is to die in Paradise! The Jews pretend that 
they are coming back to their own country, 
because they were ejected by violence and 
violence has never given rights to anybody. 


Boon! 





SON Ee Yuh ACEO DN eh Ee RG OWS ake ke de 


But did they not settle here by right of con- 
quest themselves? They came from Chaldea, 
from the Euphrates Valley. Abraham him- 
self was so much an alien in Canaan that he 
sent a servant to Chaldea to find a wife 
worthy of his son Isaac and the Bible is full 
of the struggles of their kings to subdue the 
country. We settled here in our turn. Why 
should our conquest not give us as good a 
right to the country as theirs? Do we claim 
Andalusia because we maintained a splendid 
civilization there for centuries?) Why perpe- 
trate the great injustice of putting a dead 
race where there is a living one? During the 
whole duration of the War when we fought 
beside the Allies, they held before us the idea 
of a great Arabic Empire and now, as a re- 
ward, they want to hand us over to the Jews! 
That’s what it amounts to, isn’t it? ‘To be 
obliged to receive these emigrants, to be 
allowed to be their equals on our own terri- 
tory, to have to endure the imposition of their 
language upon us, it is true that it is not abso- 
lute submission, but we won’t be our own 


[947 


THE: VFOLCES! OF PALESTINE 


masters any more. When these foreigners 
coming from God knows where are here, two 
or three hundred thousand of them, with their 
resources and their cleverness, what will be- 
come of us? We shall be their slaves, their 
servants in our own country.” 


And the Christians, too, have their say: 


“For centuries we have been seeing Turk- 
ish soldiers mounting guard at the Tomb of 
Christ. Did the last Crusade take place to 
put Jews in their places? If they come back 
to the Holy Land filled with the same spirit 
in which they condemned Jesus, to what ex- 
tremes will their fanaticism carry them? 
Shall we see them here, in the rebuilt Temple 
sacrificing sheep, lambs and doves to Jeho- 
vah? We do not know of any Messiah having 
changed their Laws about that. If, as they 
claim, Jehovah has ceased to interest them, 
what can we expect from a faithless Judaism? 
Humanity! Justice! We know to what vio- 
lence these two words can lead and they call 
them the essence of the Jewish spirit to-day. 


[95 J 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





Believers or infidels, people who think they 
have been persecuted for two thousand years 
by Christian nations are apt to be tempted, 
as soon as they are powerful enough, to take 
their revenge in the place where their troubles 
started. What will the Wandering Jew do 
once he is back in Jerusalem, after his ardu- 
ous journey?” 


But of all these protests, the most surpris- 
ing is certainly the one that comes from the 
Wall of Wailing. Only yesterday I was ask- 
ing myself: ‘“How can the modern J ews whom 
one meets everywhere in the new Jerusalem, 
with their flashy clothes and their haughty 
airs, have anything in common with the pious 
beggars of Israel, who have come here to 
die?” I know now. I have heard the 
ghetto’s lament! 

I heard it in the quarter of the Jews from 
Holland. This consists of an irregular court, 
rather spacious, with very mangy grass and 
a few dusty acacias, surrounded by squat 
houses, unsafe stairs and worm-eaten bal- 


he 7) 


Peete ODM ES! OR OP CO ke ST ITN E 


conies. I was ushered into a room freshly 
painted a bluish white, through whose narrow 
barred window could be seen a tomb-covered 
hill, sloping towards the valley of Josaphat. 
It was the dwelling-place of Rabbi Sonnen- 
feld, one of the old men whose thoughts are as 
old as Jerusalem itself. How far one was in 
his presence from the businesslike prophets 
whose photographs adorn the Zionist papers, 
who try to harmonize their vague Hebrew 
ideals with the ones they have borrowed from 
Western civilization! In his long, black caf- 
tan, he was tall, thin, endless. His cheeks 
were so white, that one could scarcely tell 
where his long, white beard began. He had 
the paleness of the chickens which the Jews 
empty of all their blood and soak for a long 
time in salted water before cooking. His 
voice was flat and colorless, but his eyes had 
kept the passionate light of youth, I mean, of 
course, of ancient times. 

Here was what he told me, as nearly as I 
can repeat it. But how am I to describe to 
you all the white tombstones, as I saw them 


ial 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


myself through the narrow window? In the 
luminous silence of the countryside, they 
looked as if they were gliding over the hill 
to listen to him!... 


“We are thy slaves, O Lord! It is the Law 
and the Law endureth for ever. On the day 
when we Hebrews accepted that slavery, 
our fate was irrevocably fixed. Both good 
and evil come to us only from God! And 
yet some madmen think they can take the 
place of the Almighty and rebuild Jerusalem 
with their own hands. Mr. Balfour is their 
Messiah! But has this Mr. Balfour driven 
out the Christians and the Mohammedans 
from the country? Has he rebuilt the Tem- 
ple, reinstalled the Holy of Holies, put up 
the altar of the holocausts at the top of Mount 
Moriah? Does he think he has done any- 
thing when he allows a few Jews to settle in 
Palestine? Did the pious among us wait for 
his permission to come? Alas, the misfor- 
tunes of centuries still burden the Holy City. 
And another sorrow is added to the ancient 


[98 4 


THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 


sorrow,—new sins to the old sins of Israel! 
These modern Jews, whose faces, clean-shaven 
like pigs, are in themselves an offense to the 
Lord, bring their impiety with them. They 
open schools where every name is mentioned 
except Jehovah’s. For ordinary conversa- 
tion and for teaching their so-called knowl- 
edge they use the sacred language of prayer, 
and if they keep on they will soon teach 
the asses to bray in Hebrew! The Town 
would still be standing if the Sabbath had 
been observed. But do they observe it? Do 
we see them in the synagogues? Do they 
come to lament at the foot of the Wall? 
Now they intend to impose a tax on the un- 
leavened bread we eat at Easter. But we 
won't pay it. We won’t place ourselves in 
their power. Blessed be the Lord God! He 
delivered us from Pharaoh! He brought us 
back from Babylon and captivity, He has 
kept us intact in the midst of the Gentiles and 
He will preserve us now from those Jews, 
full of pride, who believe no longer in their 
Lord’s promises, those Jews who come here 


[997 


“NEXT YEAR IN VEROUSALEM, 


not with the Talmud and the Thora, but with 
the gospel of Karl Marx... .” 

A light rosy flush had come to the cheeks 
of the old man. In this pale old face, there 
was still some blood which anger brought to 
the surface. He pointed with his long bony 
finger to the extraordinary landscape outside 
the barred window and all the dead of cen- 
turies buried in the valley of Josaphat. “The 
Jews sleeping there waited all their lives for 
the Messiah, we are also waiting for him and 
others will wait after us, but Jerusalem will - 
never be rebuilt by faithless Jews!” 


And to all those voices and complaints 
which come from the four corners of the 
earth, the Wandering Jew answers, not with 
the humility of the conquered, but with the 
pride of a master returning home after two 
thousand years’ absence: 

“What does Palestine represent to a 
reasonable mind? It is Israel’s native land, 
the country where we created ideas worth 
something to humanity as a whole. Since we 


[ 100 7 


THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 


have been driven out of it, we have occupied 
it better by our tribulations and our desire 
twenty centuries old than if all our people 
had never ceased to live in it. Where are 
our martyrs and our dead, we are asked? 
We have given of our blood everywhere, but 
always for other nations. The Arabs may 
say that they have been here for thirteen hun- 
dred years, but everything is the same as if 
they had come yesterday. Uncultivated 
land, a culture more sterile than the sand or 
the rock, that’s all their occupation has given 
the country. What have they made of Pales- 
tine? What has the country of abundance 
spoken of in the Bible become? We need all 
our love to find in this Jezebel the beautiful 
features of old! And yet the dear face re- 
tains something of its former beauty. On the 
Mediterranean Sea the best oats of the world 
still grow around Gaza. The plain of Sharon 
has its orange and almond trees and its vine- 
yards still. At the foot of Nazareth, the 
Esdrelon country still produces barley and 
wheat! If the waters of ‘Tiberias were 


[1017 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





cleverly utilized, why could not the Jordan 
valley become a new Egypt? One can see 
on the mountains of Judea, now so arid and 
crumbling, the remains of a succession of 
terraces, such as still exist on the hills of 
Lebanon. We will build up those terraces 
again, we will have hanging gardens once 
more. We are the only ones who have 
enough love for this country to be willing to 
bury in the tired earth, the marshes and the 
sand, the effort and the immense capital nec- 
essary to bring it back to life. All over the 
earth there are other countries, healthier and 
richer, but for us Jews there is none so rich 
or so healthy. Here work has an attraction 
for us that it has nowhere else in the world. 
In redeeming this country, it is our spirit, our 
soul, we are going to resuscitate. Among the 
Christian nations we were so busy trying to 
make ourselves acceptable that we ceased be- 
ing true Jews, we became instead odious to 
others and unfaithful to ourselves. In the 
ghettos of Russia we were more dead than 
alive, tied down by stupid laws, which may 


r 1027 


THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 


have been useful long ago, but are senseless 
to-day. Sonnenfeld’s time is past. It is 
thanks to him and others like him, that we 
have been made the miserable people you see 
in the older Jerusalem. We will let the 
Mohammedans and the Christians alone. 
We do not come to bring back to life an out- 
of-date Judaism. Not one of us would ever 
think of insulting the Holy Sepulcher, or of 
destroying the Mosque of Omar to build the 
Temple in its place. Is there a Jew in his 
right senses who would sacrifice oxen, lambs 
and doves there? We have other things to 
think about! The free genius of Israel does 
not have its source somewhere in Heaven, at 
the feet of Jehovah, but on the ground of 
Palestine, in the hearts of the Jewish people. 
We will recover this genius that we have lost 
during our exile, we will become again, if we 
can, the agricultural and pastoral people that 
we once were.” 


[1034 





THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 





CHAPTER VI 
THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 


TuHosE rather declamatory Jews are not 
the Firsts who came to Palestine to resume an 
intimacy with the soil, which had been inter- 
rupted for nearly two thousand years. 
About forty years ago some Russian Jews, 
terrified by the pogroms which followed the 
assassination of Czar Alexander the Second, 
came for refuge to this land of their eter- 
nal hope. They were town-dwellers, intellec- 
tuals and small merchants, carried away by 
the romantic desire to lead on the Land of 
their Ancestors the existence of the Hebrews 
of long ago. They were called Choveve-Zion, 
that is to say, the Lovers of Zion, or Bilou, a 
word made out of the first letters of the five 
Hebrew words which mean: Sons of Jacob, 
let us go away together! The first-comers 
settled down at Petah-Tikwah, the Door of 
Hope, upon a marshy ground, in ruined 


[107 7 


COUN CeO NY Te ar EIN Fie be oS OG de ee 


buildings built some years before by Bul- 
garian Jews who had been driven away by 
fever. Some others bought an estate of 
about six hundred acres which was named 
Rishon-le-Zion, that is to say, the Firsts of 
Zion. ‘There was no water there, the soil was 
very stony and they had no money to bore 
wells. Still others settled in Rosch-Pinah, 
the Key Vault, between Safed and the Jor- 
dan; others in Zichron-Jacob, the Remem- 
brance of Jacob, at the foot of Mount 
Carmel; others wandered about without 
resources or shelter and everywhere the same 
misfortunes dogged the steps_of these un- 
lucky creatures who had had too much confi- 
dence in their Bible. 

Palestine was far from being the good 
country flowing with milk and honey, wheat 
and malt spoken of in the Scriptures, abound- 
ing with manna from Heaven, of which one 
can dream by a warm stove in Berditchev, or 
in Kiev, or in the depths of a cellar during the 
anguish of a pogrom. But has it ever been 
a good country? A Jewish legend relates 


[108 4 


THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 


that when Jehovah showed Moses the Prom- 
ised Land from Mount Nebo, on the other 
side of Jordan—such a fantastic array of 
inextricably mixed mountains, ash-colored, 
without a tree or a plant, and the Jordan val- 
ley which is nothing but sand and dry-caked 
mud, left by the waters of the Dead Sea— 
the Prophet who had just spent forty years 
in the Wilderness uttered these words: 
“Whither dost Thou lead us, O Lord?” And 
to reassure him God showed him Jericho, with 
its flowing spring and its motionless palms at 
the foot of the naked mountains. Perhaps 
that oasis was less barren than it is to-day, 
but that poor little spot of green must have 
seemed very insignificant to the aged shep- 
herd of Israel, who had still fresh in his 
memory the rich land of the Nile. The Bible 
says that he died on that day on Mount Nebo, 
and that the Lord struck him down because 
of a sin committed forty years previously in 
the Wilderness of Zen, when his confidence in 
God had weakened before the murmurings of 
his people. But I rather suspect that, when 


[ 109 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


he saw a Promised Land which was itself a 
Wilderness, his heart failed him and he died 
from the shock. 

Samaria and Galilee, that Moses could not 
very well have seen from the top of Mount 
Nebo, would have consoled him a little. 
There, in the midst of a stony and arid land, 
are found fields and orchards, places full of 
an idyllic charm, where beast and man come 
to drink of the same water and rest in the 
same shade. Along the coast, among the 
marshes, one occasionally sees charming 
spots, but on the whole it is a country very 
badly treated by nature and very much aban- 
doned by man. And it is small, too, exceed- 
ingly small, so small indeed, that one wonders 
how all the grandiose names can fit such tiny 
places. ... | 

The unlucky Lovers of Zion had settled in 
particularly unpleasant places. They had 
spent all their money to buy the land. 
Where were they to find the necessary re- 
sources to cultivate the soil, to irrigate it, 
to make the place healthy or at least livable? 


[1107 


THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 





Those who dwelt in Zichron-Jacob were 
obliged to sell even their scrolls of the Thora! 
Fever played havoc with these poor, weak 
people who could not stand a climate to 
which they were unaccustomed. Many died, 
others went away, and the ones that were left 
were about to disappear in their turn when 
a miracle took place, just the same kind of 
miracle one reads about in Persian tales, 
which begin badly and end well, thanks to 
some good genie who arrives just in the nick 
of time. 


Wherever you go in Palestine, you'll hear 
the Baron mentioned. Which Baron? Well, 
the only one who exists for Jews there, Baron 
Edmund de Rothschild. He is a living magi- 
cian, the good genie who took pity on their 
distant misery and saved them from utter dis- 
aster. Rishon-le-Zion, the Firsts of Zion, 
were on their last legs and he took them under 
his protection. Then came the turn of those 
of Rosch-Pinah, those of Petah-Tikwah and 
finally of all of them. The Key of the Vault, 


tie 


“NEXT OY BAR IN FEROS AL bye’ 


the Door of Hope, the Great Space, were all 
too small to keep alive the families which were 
crowding one another on the sand. All those 
whose hopes were sinking sent their distress- 
signals to him. Then he sent them money 
and more money, for irrigating the sands, 
for drying up the marshes, for boring wells, 
making roads, planting trees and vines, for 
buildings of all kinds, cellars, wine-cellars; 
he had to bribe the Turks who had forbidden 
all buildings, who would not even allow a 
stable or a barn to go up, who had even 
ordered the buildings already in existence 
pulled down; he had to pay the taxes, to pay 
the agricultural experts and the watchmen 
who protected them from attack from the 
Arab plunderers; to pay the Rabbis, the 
teachers, the doctors, the chemists, all indis- 
pensable to the Jews, who can’t get along 
without teaching or remedies. 

Some directors sent from Paris saw to 
everything, provided all the needs of these 
amateur colonists, paid all deficits and made 
up for all the reverses, whether caused by 


p12 7 


DAES PLES Die LOVERS OF 21 ON 


nature or by men’s inexperience. After 
some years, eucalyptus groves, vineyards, 
plantations of lemon and orange trees sprang 
up from the sands, agreeably surprising the 
eye amid the barrenness of their surround- 
ings. Among those green gardens lived a 
small bourgeoisie, thanks to the Baron’s help, 
just as in Jerusalem the beggars at the Wall 
of Wailing live on Israel’s charity. The land 
was cultivated by Arabs or by poor Jews 
from Yemen who had become accustomed to 
the heavy labor of the fields in their own 
country. And all these peoples found it just 
and reasonable that the munificence of their 
distant patron should reward them for lead- 
ing in the Land of their Ancestors this easy 
life, which, they wrongly imagined, had been 
the kind of life led by the ancient Hebrews. 

For the last twenty years those colonies 
which have let themselves be guided by the 
shepherd’s crook of Baron de Rothschild, 
have been conducting their affairs themselves. 
But now, just as before, the Baron is still the 
Providence to whom everybody turns in hard 


[113 7 


CES Te AE NE Pe hes 0) Sha ee ae 


times. All hands are held out to him if the 
oranges sell badly, if the heat has turned the 
wine into vinegar or if it is discovered sud- 
denly that it would be wise to grow lemons 
instead of oranges. Hardly a third of the 
children born in the colonies remain there 
and the others leave them without regrets to 
take their chances elsewhere. One does not 
know which to wonder at most, Baron de 
Rothschild’s persistence in trying to create a 
race of Jewish planters in Palestine or the 
powerlessness of the Jews to change them- 
selves into agriculturists. 


c1144 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


ie ins 
ike a 
nM) Ase 


ery 





CHAPTER VII 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


THE new pioneers of Israel despise the 
people of the old colonies with all their hearts, 
—those bourgeois, they say, the Baron’s 
slaves, as the lamenters at the Wall are 
Jehovah’s slaves! They do not want to lead 
the lives of sad peasants bent over their work, 
such as are seen in all the countries of Europe. 
It is not to establish there the old forms of 
Western civilization that the people most 
passionately attached to equality and justice 
come back to the Ancestral Land. Once 
again Zion will give a Law, once again Israel 
will create in the social and economic order 
something comparable to what it once accom- 
plished in the divine order. 

All the ills the world suffers from come 
from the old Roman idea that individual 
property must be absolute and perpetual. 
This detestable principle must be replaced by 


p17 7 





"NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM 


another, a principle very old and yet very 
new, of a purely Jewish inspiration. It is 
said in the book of Leviticus: “And all the 
Tithe of the land, is the Lord’s: it is holy 
unto the Lord.” The Lord! the pioneers of 
the new Zion have, I believe, ceased to believe 
in Him. But they replace Jehovah by the 
idea of the Jewish people, and in their new 
Law, they interpret thus the text from the 
Old Testament: “The land will not be sold 
for ever, for it is mine, saith Israel.” 

A fund, called the National Fund, made up 
of contributions that come from the Jews all 
over the world, buys back piece by piece the 
sacred Land of their Ancestors. When an 
emigrant wants some, the land is not sold to 
him, but a temporary assignment is made. If 
the newcomer has enough money, a lot is given 
to him with a long lease-term, with the strict 
understanding that he and his family alone 
will work it without help from the natives. 
He can also, if he wants to, join as a partner 
one of the numerous communist colonies. 
Some of them are completely communistic, 


ris] 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 





others are cooperative, others still adopt an in- 
termediary plan, each family working on their 
lot but all the families uniting to buy machin- 
ery, seeds, cattle, etc.,and sharing all general 
expenses. If the emigrant has no money, he 
joins as a laborer a farm belonging to the 
National Fund, where he receives besides his 
daily pay a part of the benefits. He can also 
find work in one of those battalions of work- 
men organized in a military way—laborers in 
the building trade, agricultural laborers, rail- 
way laborers who go from place to place, 
wherever their services are required. When 
he has put some money by, he can, in his 
turn, settle down on a farm. ‘Thus each 
colonist is Israel’s farmer. The Jewish peo- 
ple remain the only owners of the land. It 
benefits by the increase of value given to 
the land by the work of its farmers; it re- 
serves for itself the right to raise its rents 
in order to buy more land, and if a lot is 
not cultivated, or is not well looked after, it 
can take it back at the end of the lease. As 
for the colonist he has the advantage of not 


[1197 


TN Ee TO AR IN Sere SA Bev" 


having to put up any money to get land and 
of being able to use all the money he has 
for improvements. The agricultural laborer 
who gets a part of the benefits is not con- 
demned all his life to live from day to day. 
Just as, according to the ancient Law, the 
Jewish slave could not be held in bondage 
for more than seven years, through the force 
of circumstances the proletariat will also free 
itself. Thus Israel will rid itself at the same 
time, or rather it believes it will, of the two 
plagues of the world: capitalism and wages. 


I have visited the colonies created by the 
National Fund, from Jaffa to Jerusalem, 
from Haifa to Tiberias, and I have met on 
the roads many battalions of workmen. All 
these people work hard, they make canals 
for irrigation purposes, they plant trees, they 
mend roads. In the evenings, they assemble 
in their tents or their wooden shanties, to 
discuss endlessly some political, social or 
economic question, to listen to a lecture or to 
go to some concert or some moving-picture. 


[1207 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


Their life is hard and I don’t want to criti- 
cize, but I got the impression that they 
ought to be pitied, because they are, for 
the most part, ill-suited to their work. You 
will look in vain for one among them who 
will say simply: “At home, I made caps 
or cut shoe-leather.”” They always say with- 
out fail, “I was a student at home.” If you 
ask to see their diplomas, they have always 
lost them or else they have been stolen from 
them during their wanderings. <A. certain 
brutality on many faces rather makes one 
think that their memories are at fault, but 
whether they have really studied at some 
university or whether they were originally 
tailors or shoemakers, they are all imbued 
with the deplorable idea that intellectual gifts 
are superior to all others, and that they are 
doing something admirable by condescending 
to work in the fields. 

In other countries this exaltation of the 
mind is the reason for the success of Israel, 
but it is not wanted in this new land, which 
requires muscular energy above everything 
else. J must say that I don’t care for the 


[1217 





ONE AT AY eA TINA ad (Ee ke Oy 4 i Se Wada 


shepherd who reads Tolstoy while looking 
after his flock, the workman who carries un- 
der his arm the poetry of some Viennese deca- 
dent poet and the young girl who would 
rather break stones along the roads than look 
after a household, under the pretext of help- 
ing Palestine much_bétter that way! Those 
pioneers who carry with them moving-pic- 
tures, pianos, lectures, literary evenings, just 
as the Hebrews carried the Ark, do not in- 
spire much confidence in their farming and 
laboring abilities. Do they themselves feel 
that way about it? Is it because of that, that 
they all have such strained and sad expres- 
sions? I have never seen either men or 
women smile. But how can they be happy, 
when they carry inside themselves the idea 
that they are not like other people and that 
all the world is looking at them! All these 
social experiments of which those poor people 
are so proud spread the mantle of Noah upon 
a miserable reality. Whether they are or- 
ganized in a communistic, a socialistic, co- 
operative or patriarchal manner, they are 
able to live only through help from the out- 


[122] 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


side. Just like the old lamenters at the Wall, 
they live on the alms of the whole of the 
Jewish people. Not one of these colonies is 
self-supporting. Each one of those halout- 
zim is a luxury that Israel indulges in. 

How far one is from the romantic imagin- 
ings of Herzl! He could see the Jews all 
over the world, filled with a holy joy, selling 
their houses, winding up their businesses, 
liquidating their capital, to come to Pales- 
tine and find there the equivalent of what 
they were leaving behind them. That moun- 
tainous wave which was to shake the Jewish 
world to its depths and bring all Israel by 
an irresistible impulse to Judea, that wave 
did not come. Not a Jew from Germany, 
Italy, France, England or America, not one 
of those Jews who, according to rumor, were 
horrified at the thought of absorption by for- 
eign nations, not one of those Jews has left 
his adopted country to conquer Jerusalem. 
The only people who have come are those who 
have nothing to lose, Russians, Poles, Rouma- 
nians, and even in Russia the enthusiasm has 
cooled. Before the War, it was really the 


r 123-7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


only country where life was made difficult 
for the Jews, but since then there have been 
many changes, and now in Russia they have 
the same rights as everybody else. They have 
even the unhoped-for happiness of having 
within reach that to which they are so well 
adapted, a revolution, and a revolution made 
by themselves and for themselves! Why 
should they try their social experiments in a 
poverty-stricken country, when they can ex- 
ercise their genius in a country full of re- 
sources and peopled by a hundred million in- 
habitants? So many of those who, in other 

times, would have looked towards Palestine, 
~ see now only a poor country where, as Trot- 
sky, a Jew himself, says, short-sighted people 
are trying to resuscitate a narrow nationalism. 

Neither did they get as much money as 
they had hoped for. Enthusiastic Jews travel . 
all over the world, to awake in Israel both 
enthusiasm and generosity, but Israel is very 
unaccountable, it is ardent and skeptical, it 
is rich and poor, charitable but not deeply 
generous. ‘They help one another willingly 
from door to door, from house to house, but 


[1247 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


when it comes to helping a great idea so re- 
mote, purses and hearts alike are adamant. 
There is no deep national feeling to make 
them feel the need of reestablishing a home 
in Palestine. Year in and year out a French 
Jew gives about eighteen centimes, an Ital- 
jan fifty, an English one less than two 
franes. I do not know what the sum is in 
America, but in spite of the great sums given 
there, one must not have any illusions, for 
when one thinks that there is a population of 
four million Jews, the contributions per head 
are really very small. In spite of oneself, 
one cannot help thinking that this attempt to 
transplant all the Jews in the world has cre- 
ated much ado about nothing, since it has 
only succeeded in creating, here and there, 
those isolated communities of Jews, some of 
which are already disintegrating. 

The most enthusiastic Zionists do not hide 
their disillusionment, but cannot resign them- 
selves to the belief that, after all, all the Jews 
of the world are not aflame with the purest 
love of Zion, so that, instead of attributing 
the failure of this great enterprise to Israel’s 


[ 125 7 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 





apathy, they throw all the responsibility on 
British duplicity. How many times have I 
heard these words: ‘“‘It is true, our rich co- 
religionists in Europe and America have not 
left their comforts and their businesses to 
come to Jerusalem. We expected they 
would, but frankly we never counted very 
much on them. Thank God, we have enough 
poor devils here to populate a country three 
or four times as big as Palestine! If they 
do not come in much greater numbers, the 
English are to blame. ‘They said to us: 
‘Here is your country, your national home. 
Enter, it is yours. ‘Then, when we came, 
instead of opening the country freely to us, 
they shut the door in our faces and let in 
just enough of us to save theirs. About a 
thousand a month, at the most, are allowed in. 
That’s too few to do anything, but it is | 
enough to make the Arabs hate us; to give 
the English a good reason to occupy a coun- 
try where everybody would be at everybody 
else’s throat, if they were not there to police 
it. Do you know the Jewish story? A Jew 
arrives at an inn, the hostess asks him: ‘What 


[ 126 J 


THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 


do you want?—‘Well,’ he says, ‘a breaded 
chop with potatoes.—‘I have no chops.’— 
‘Well, then, give me an omelet.—‘An ome- 
let? I have no eggs. —‘Give me a herring.’— 
“With an onion and some tea, you can’t die of 
hunger.’ “Oh, you Jews, you want every- 
thing, don’t you??—That’s our story in Pal- 
estine. What is this national home that the 
English have given us? Not even a dried 
herring! With these two words, they have 
excited our imagination, only too ready to 
see the future in rosy colors, to the point of 
delirium. ‘The word national fed our eternal 
illusions, it seemed to give us a country, and 
the word home was put there to reassure the 
Arabs. To them they said: ‘A home is not 
a state. What does it matter if the Jews 
found a home in Palestine?’ We see to-day 
that we have been the dupes of the English 
and that under the cover of the righting of 
a wrong two thousand years old, they set- 
tled here to protect India and Egypt. But 
what will become of us? Is it not an illusion 
to bury work and money in a country which 
probably never will be ours, and to use all 


[1277 





UG IVE TR i hoe WUE ING ke ed eee ave 


our energy creating in Palestine a garden 
for the Arabs and a military barrier for the 
British Empire?” 


Whether it is due to Israel’s indifference 
or to the fear that its sacrifices will not 
aid towards a Jewish State which appears 
more and more problematical, the fact is, 
there is no money. ‘The thirty thousand 
Jews who have landed at Jaffa since the 
Balfour Declaration find it hard to live. 
Each boat which arrives with its contingent 
of emigrants is a danger for the others and 
tends to destroy the frail equilibrium which 
has been established. In the first days of 
enthusiasm, they went up to one another ask- 
ing: “Have you got work?” To-day, the 
question is, and it is asked ironically and 
sadly: “Have you got a passport?” A pass- 
port for a country more favorable to the suc- 
cess of the Jews than sad Judea. A lot of 
them have left and among those that re- 
main, I wonder how many I would find, 
if I went back there in ten years? 


1287 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


a Ve 
Aids Bh 
i WAGE | 


Cth eet 





CHAPTER VIII 
THE SON OF JUDEA 


Burt the Jews in Jerusalem have accom- 
plished a miracle. Hebrew is spoken every- 
where, in the streets, in the schools, on the 
roads, in the colonies, in the offices, in the 
shops. It is really miraculous, for the old 
language of the Bible had been dead for two 
thousand years, as dead as the Jews sleeping 
under the stones in the valley of Josaphat. 
It was the language of prayer and of the 
Holy Scriptures. All the children learned 
how to read it from infancy, but no school- 
master would have thought of trying to teach 
his pupils to understand what they were re- 
citing. What was the use of wasting time 
on such futilities! The most important thing 
was for the child to know, as quickly as pos- 
sible, a chapter of the Bible by rote. The 
schoolmaster himself, who could have recited 
without hesitation, from beginning to end, 


1317 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


the whole of the Thora, very often did not 
know its meaning. It was not the least ex- 
traordinary feature of the extraordinary 
ghettos to hear, at all moments of the day, 
in the houses or in the synagogues, for the 
prayers and for the innumerable blessings, 
by which all their life is ordered, those Hebraic 
words which nobody understood. 

I saw the first man to bring this dead 
language out of the books, back to ordinary 
use, some weeks before his death. His Rus- 
sian name was Eliezer Lazarovitch Elianow; 
his Hebrew name, Ben Y ehouda, that is to say, 
Son of Judea. Here is the story of his life 
as he told it to me, himself,—one of those 
strange Jewish existences of which long pe- 
riods seem to have belonged to other epochs; 
a daily miracle of enthusiasm and poverty, 
which through a thousand obstacles and vicis- 
situdes has realized what appeared to be at 
first an impossibility. 


His childhood was spent in a Lithuanian 
ghetto and up to his fifteenth year he led 


[1327 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


the existence usual for the students of the 
Talmud forty years ago in those small Jew- 
ish universities called Yeshiva. Imagine, in 
an isolated village, a house with a thatched 
roof and there, grouped around some famous 
Rabbi, twenty young men dressed in caftans, 
with round hats and long curls falling on 
their faces, discussing all day long a point 
of the Talmud. Very often the text itself 
was quite clear, but is there a clear text for 
a Hebrew mind? Reb Hillel said, for ex- 
ample: “As ye would that men should do 
to you, do ye also likewise to them.” It 
looks simple, but it is evident that Reb Hillel 
wanted to say something else, because if that 
was all he meant to say, where was his genius? 
And Isaiah, the prophet of storms, could he 
have said things that you and I could under- 
stand immediately? Would God have poured 
into his soul all the floods of Heaven and 
earth to get out of his lips a small spring 
of pure water? Those Rabbis were able to 
make the most ordinary sayings incompre- 
hensible. 


138 4 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


They made everything difficult and they 
always saw about ten different meanings in 
a sentence, which obviously could have only 
one. ‘They called to their rescue the host of 
commentators who, for centuries, had worked 
hard to solve that question; they were accus- 
tomed to refuting one another and in the’end, 
they, in turn, raised a magnificent edifice, a 
sublime tower of David, a brilliant new solu- 
tion which was interesting to them, only be- 
cause it was absolutely different from any 
they had considered previously. During the 
lesson, any of the pupils had the right to 
stop the Rabbi, to point out some weak point 
in his logic. ‘They all crowded about him, 
shouting in his ears in a frightful confusion, 
for all they cared about was showing off. 
They all answered together and in that small 
space, covered with mouldy straw, which had 
become the rendezvous of those extraordinary | 
chatterers, those inimitable debaters, who for 
ages have been seeking light in the darkness 
and sunshine during the rainy weather, who 
among them thought about hunger and cold? 


[134] 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


Who would think about it, under that thatch 
through which the night snow leaked as it 
melted in the winter sun and fell in icy drops 
on their delirious enthusiasm? 

In those villages of Yeshiva it was an an- 
cient custom and almost a duty for the Jews 
to give hospitality to the students of the 
Talmud. Each student took his midday meal 
in the same house, sometimes for a week, a 
month or six weeks and sometimes each day 
at a different one. This was called making 
a day, or simply a day. But a day was only 
lunch and the evening’s dry bread was earned 
in a very peculiar manner. Each Friday the 
students left their school early to go begging 
in the neighboring villages. Each had his 
district, his begging territory which he visited 
every week from dawn to sunset on Fridays. 
He brought back from his journey enough to 
buy his evening bread for the week and in 
order to avoid being tempted by fresh 
bread and not to eat too much during the 
first days, they took good care to make seven 


[135 7] 


IN EEE OE Te od INS he BeOS A Ee a 


lines on the crust with chalk, a line for each 
day. | 

When Easter came they all went away for 
about three weeks. Why? ‘To beg, of course. 
Always to beg. To find enough to buy some 
shirts, shoes, a caftan and books. They al- 
ways chose to go to the poor synagogues 
frequented by a few Jews, where the only 
furnishings were four or five unsteady 
benches, a barrel for ablutions, a tin candle- 
stick and against the wall, the cupboard of 
the Thora. ‘They made the unleavened bread, 
their voices for singing the joyful hymns were 
better than those of the ordinary cantor and 
they preached sermons listened to with pleas- 
ure by poor peasants not blasé about elo- 
quence. ‘Then they went back to the shelter 
of the thatch roof and their discussions began 
again about the inexhaustible text. 

The students and their Rabbis were the 
only ones in the ghetto who knew Hebrew. 
But as all the commentaries on the Biblical 
text were made in Yiddish and it would have 
been sacrilegious to use the sacred language 


[136 7 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


even for religious teaching, it was a great 
scandal, when here and there, in the ghetto, 
young men well thought of in the Yeshiva, 
began to take an interest in the old Hebraic 
language for its own sake, learning its gram- 
mar, appreciating its beauty and finally in 
their audacity going as far as to use it for or- 
dinary purposes. The Jew Mendelsohn had 
outraged every decency in translating into 
German the five books of Moses. As if it 
were possible to take away from the Law the 
sound that God gave it, without changing and 
debasing it! A sin that was greater still was 
to use in an ordinary manner the words used 
by the Lord, those words that His mouth had 
uttered, to make them fit things that the Lord 
of the Jews was not interested in. The old 
ghetto was getting worried, it called all those 
young men Epicureans, making this word 
mean all that poor humanity can conceive in 
the way of vanity, sin and malice. The old 
ghetto was partly right. This indiscreet 
curiosity and this unheard-of carelessness 
about abstract words were the tremors, the 


[137 7 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


first signs of a desire for foreign knowledge, 
of an aspiration, vague as yet, to escape from 
the old discipline and the traditional science 
centered altogether around the commentaries 
of the Law. Through a very strange meet- 
ing the taste for this language—asleep for 
two thousand years—and the taste for new 
thoughts were suddenly associated and 
grew together as natural allies. Some 
small newspapers written in Hebrew which 
circulated under the caftan, began to 
spread unknown venoms in far-away com- 
munities. One day, a day not to be forgot- 
ten, a novel, the first to be translated into 
Hebrew, “The Mysteries of Paris,” suddenly 
brought to the notice of austere Jewish life 
the great prestige of Western civilization! 


Eliezer Lazarovitch, who was short and 
slight, with a yellow complexion, already the 
prey of tuberculosis, was preaching one day 
ina synagogue to some Jews gathered around 
the almemar. ‘They all wore their greasy 
caftans, their fur caps, their beards and their 


[1384 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


curls. A stranger who did not wear the gab- 
ardine, a Moscow merchant, on business in 
the village, carried away by the eloquence 
of the student, went up to him and offered 
to take him into his house and to pay for his 
education. He was one of those Jews who 
admire Western culture and think they are 
doing a worthy deed by rescuing from the 
ghetto a promising boy to give him Russian 
schooling. 

In Moscow, Eliezer went to the Lycée. In 
the evenings, after dinner, he gave Hebrew 
lessons to Deborah, the eldest daughter of 
the merchant, who was about his own age. 
That went on for three or four years. One 
day (it was in the spring of 1877) the mer- 
chant, coming home, brought the news that 
the Russians were going to fight the Turks 
in order to help the Bulgarians. The whole 
family was in favor of Turkey, but Eliezer 
surprised them all by being violently in favor 
of the Russians. “They are right to help 
their brothers! We Jews never do that, that 
is why we remain weak and scattered all over 


[1397 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


the universe!” Everybody laughed at him 
except Deborah. From that moment, the 
other children made his life so unbearable 
that he decided to go away. He confided 
only in Deborah. She gave him some rubles 
she had saved, then, when he crossed the 
threshold for the last time, she put her hand 
over his head, blessing him and saying good- 
by: “God bless you, Eliezer, I'll come to you 
whenever you call for me.” 

He went on foot most of the time, stop- 
ping at Warsaw, Lemberg and Berlin just 
long enough to earn some money by giving 
Hebrew lessons. It took him a year to reach 
Paris. One day, in a barn, during this long 
journey, his mission became plain to him 
with a forcefulness that ideas often have in 
Jewish minds where a Messianic dream lies 
dormant. He would raise the old Hebraic 
words from the dead, make Hebrew a living 
language, he would discard along with the 
gabardine and the fur cap, the awful Yiddish, 
that jargon for second-hand dealers, made up 
of odds and ends, a dialect only fit for slaves. 


[1404 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


He would use the ancient language of the 
Kings, the Prophets and the Judges and by 
so doing, unite Israel again! . .. Every 
thing seemed clear and simple to him, the 
straw of the barn was shining and in com- 
memoration of his resolution which was to 
create a new life, in this poor barn without any 
wise men, a Virgin or a star, he christened 
himself, Ben Yehouda, son of Judea. 

In Paris he found himself penniless. Then 
a mysterious Pole appeared in his life, an 
émigré of °48, who was dreaming of reviving 
Poland as Ben Yehouda was dreaming of re- 
viving Judea. ‘The Pole had taken a fancy to 
this funny little Jew who dreamt the same 
dream. Indeed they were as much alike in 
their dreams as in their poverty. The clever 
Pole knew Paris thoroughly and in moments 
of distress he always found a place to which 
they could invite themselves, and if no food 
could be found, it was always easy to find 
another kind of food, an ideal kind, in the 
lecture rooms of the Collége de France, or in 
the Chamber of Deputies, where the two 


1417 


hl 4 OD. Gas A a a «ne As ee) ae Oo can Oi I Oe OR) a 


friends would lunch on a speech of Gambetta. 

It was no diet, of course, for a man with 
tuberculosis. Ben Yehouda became ill, he 
had to leave Paris for a warmer climate. 
Where did the money come from for their 
journey? The Pole looked after that. One 
fine day they both arrived in Algiers. Al- 
giers, Tunis, Carthage! On the top of the 
hill where Dido settled at the head of a colony 
of Phenicians from Tyre, the Son of Judea 
dreamt to his heart’s content of the greatness 
and spirit of enterprise of his Semite ances- 
tors. He was thinking of going to Palestine, 
where the editor of the Rose of Sharon, a 
small weekly published in Hebrew, was offer- 
ing him a fortune, a salary of twenty francs 
amonth. Should he answer the call of Judea 
and seize this golden opportunity? His heart 
was for it, but the Pole was uneasy about 
the life of poverty which Ben Yehouda would 
find in Palestine and persuaded him to ask 
first the advice of the man Ben Yehouda ad- 
mired more than anybody else in the world, 


[1424 


LEY SON eb FO Dh A 


without ever having seen him, Smolensky, the 
novelist of the ghetto. 


I am sorry that I do not know Hebrew. 
I have only read fragments, translated pages 
of Smolensky’s famous novel, ““A Wanderer 
Through Life’s Byways.” They have 
stayed in my memory like the rays of light 
Rembrandt suddenly projects into the shad- 
ows of a synagogue. Such clear-sighted 
glimpses of Jewish life! The page finished, 
one is sorry to be in darkness once more, un- 
able to accompany the hero whom he takes 
from adventure to adventure through the un- 
suspected misery and grandeur of the ghetto! 
He had himself been an Epicurean, and it is 
his own story that he tells all the time, the 
story of the poor intellectual, who, in the great 
disruption of ancient Jewish life in the midst 
of the deepest poverty, looks for a plank to 
cling to. He fled from the ghetto, exasper- 
ated by its fanaticism, and wandered about 
Europe, but the Occident failed him and he 
discovered at last that the truth for a Jew ex- 


[143 7 


Pd Ee Oh Ore GAL UE Ak IN ORL EO Ee OUT aS Al eke ns 


ists only in Judaism and the Messianic ideal. 
But what is the Messiah like? The old Jews 
of the synagogue still see him as a divine 
being enveloped in superstition and legend, 
who will appear some day mounted on a 
white horse, to bring Israel back to its home, 
to see that justice is done. ‘To the Wanderer 
who had found the Way, the Messianic idea 
was not an empty dream nor the still unful- 
filled hope of Heaven coming to the rescue. 
It was an immediately realizable hope for the 
moral and political resurrection of Israel, 
which would become concrete as soon as the 
Jews again became aware of their national 
unity, through studying their language, their 
religion and their social traditions. 

Ben Yehouda found Smolensky in the mis- 
erable room where he himself was printing 
with a hand press his review, Haschabar 
(Dawn), which gave such great hopes to the 
unsatisfied in the ghetto. He kissed him 
and told him of his plan of going to Pales- 
tine. “You are mad!” cried Smolensky, “you 
will be devoured there by lunatics and big- 


[1447 


THE SON) OF JUDE A 


ots!” He offered to keep him as a collabora- 
tor to Dawn. That had been the Pole’s hope. 
But a door opened, Deborah appeared! She 
had also left her father’s roof and she was 
ready to follow him to the end of the world, 
that is to say, Jerusalem. They exchanged 
the marriage rings at once. ‘Then the three 
of them, the Son of Judea, Deborah and the 
Pole, who could not reconcile himself to part- 
ing from his companion, took a boat down the 
Danube on their way to the City of Zion! 
The Gates of Iron between Belgrade and 
Orsova have seen many people pass, but they 
have never seen any as romantic as these 
three. In that journey on the river which 
seems destined by nature to witness solemn 
vows, Ben Yehouda declared solemnly to his 
wife that from that moment he would speak 
nothing but Hebrew to her. Although Deb- 
orah knew only the few words he had taught 
her, from that time on they always exchanged 
their thoughts in that forgotten language, 
which had been lost for centuries. In fact, 
they were the only ones in the whole universe 


[145 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


speaking it. They embarked on the Black 
Sea. The crossing lasted twenty days, then 
they traveled for twelve hours on donkeys 
through sterile mountains full of marvelous 
associations. Suddenly through the dust 
which is always being blown about by the wind 
in Palestine they saw the City of Eternal 
Hope, with its indented walls, placed on a 
stony plateau like a crown, but alas! only a 
crown of thorns. 

At that time, there were in Jerusalem about 
twenty thousand Jews, crowded in a small 
space, between the center of the town, the 
Mohammedan bazaars and the garden of the 
Armenian convent. It was an extraordinary 
population, unlike any other in the world, 
consisting chiefly of those old men who came 
from everywhere, from Russia, Roumania, 
Poland, to await the hour of their sleep in 
the valley of Josaphat. Having gone in an 
apotheosis, amid the cheers and the good 
wishes of their assembled neighbors, they 
found upon their arrival the eternal ghetto, 
much more than that, their native one, be- 


1467 


Die SON ORS! J U' DE A 


cause they gathered together according to the 
place, the town or the village from which they 
came. Here those who came from Hungary, 
Germany, Russia, Poland, Roumania, Aus- 
tria, Caucasus and from Bokhara. ‘There 
those who came from Tunisia, Morocco, 
Egypt, Yemen, Salonica, Smyrna or Bagdad. 
They were all small ghettos, all different and 
yet they made two big families: the Jews from 
the North and the Jews from the South. 
Those from the North, the Ashkenazim, with 
subtle and quick minds well versed in the Tal- 
mud and the Law, very fanatical, untidy in 
their appearance, spoke Yiddish; those from 
the Mediterranean, the Sephardim, less 
learned, less intellectual, more careful of their 
appearance, with better manners and with 
less fanaticism, spoke the Spanish patois that 
the Jews banished from Spain in Isabella’s 
time had brought with them. ‘The Ashkena- 
zim and the Sephardim lived quite apart. 
They did not pray together, they did not in- 
termarry and they. would never eat with each 
other, because they could not agree about the 


p47 y 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


way of killing chickens. . . . As soon as they 
arrived, all sought their own people and they 
were happy to see relations, friends, to find 
the life they thought they had left behind 
them, the same dirt, the same poverty which 
had eternally dogged their steps. But it is 
sweet to find under foreign skies the customs 
and the kind, of people that one had expected 
to leave behind for ever. The most remarkable 
thing was that those old men who had come 
there to die found miraculously a renewal of 
their youth! Did the air of Jerusalem awake 
in them something of the Patriarch’s 
strength? or must one believe the proverb 
which says that long prayers preserve life? 
In order to please Jehovah, who hates widow- 
hood, many married, after a short stay, girls 
of fourteen or fifteen. And the Lord be 
praised, they had a posterity which added to 
the Lord’s pride and to the poverty of the 
town. 

What enabled all these people to live was 
the Holy Halouka, a fantastic institution 
which, like everything else, is not a new de- 


148 4 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


parture in Jerusalem. When Cyrus allowed 
the Jews of Babylon to go back to Palestine 
the same thing happened as has happened to- 
day. Very few Jews accepted the favor ex- 
tended to them. Exile is not always unprof- 
itable. On the banks of the Euphrates the 
captive Jews had not wasted time lamenting 
under the willows; most of the exiles had done 
very well in their businesses and they had no 
desire to leave them to go back to Jerusalem. 
The only ones who went back were the un- 
successful ones, but the rich Jews of Babylon 
acquired the habit of sending every year to 
their poor coreligionists a sum of money to be 
divided among them. It was called the 
Halouka, and the custom has been kept up. 
In all communities of Eastern Europe a tax 
is raised for the support of the pious people 
who live in Jerusalem. Each house has its 
savings-box where, on every occasion—-happy 
or unhappy—a coin is thrown in for the wail- 
ers at the Wall. Once a year, alms-gatherers 
come from Palestine to get the tax, to empty 
the precious savings-boxes, bringing in ex- 


[149 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


change some of the earth of Judea; a thread 
that has gone round Rachel’s Tomb, or the 
promise of a place in the Temple when re- 
built. 

These alms are not enough to enable the 
beggars of Jerusalem to live, but, at least, it 
prevents their dying. ‘They each get very 
little of it. The journey to the Holy City 
is long and a good deal of the money gets 
lost on the way. For example, in Russia 
the considerable sums given by Jewish charity 
were first gathered by the Rabbi of Berdit- 
chev, who passed them on to the Rabbi of 
Zadagora. Those two personages, two dis- 
tinguished Rabbis, each had a retinue and 
lived on a grand scale. On Saturday, the 
day of the ritual banquets, they always had 
a hundred, sometimes two or three hundred 
guests at their table. It was only natural 
that they should keep some of the money 
that went through their hands. Was it not 
God’s will? Their secretaries were not rich 
either and who would believe that the gather- 
ers lived on nothing? When, at last, the 


[ 1507 


CIN MO: RC IF 1) i A 


money reached the City of Zion, it could not 
be divided equally among everybody. ‘There 
are ranks and castes even among: beggars, 
there are noble beggars and common ones. 
Could the grandson of a distinguished Rabbi 
be treated in the same way as a man who 
was a shoemaker in his village? 

In Jerusalem, luckily, they have always 
known the secret of how to live on nothing! 
Except on Saturdays very few people in the 
Lord’s city ever ate their fill. If everybody 
had tried to, what would have happened? 
Jerusalem’s ghetto would have disappeared 
a long time ago from the Lord’s presence! 
In their poverty, they helped one another. 
Each one knew his neighbor’s poverty as well 
as his own, they lent to one another a sauce- 
pan of coal, a measure of flour, a little oil or 
a little sugar, money, if there was any, and 
everything was lent without receipt. Charity 
was obligatory among those beggars. If 
a hand were held out to them, they had to 
give and to give something else besides a bless- 
ing! But what is one to give when one has 


[1517 


ONAN EXD WWE A SUES oh Lee OS a da Fe On 


nothing? Is there another country in the 
world where there exists such a touching and 
bizarre thing as beggars’ money for beggars? 
So that it could not be said that in the City 
of the Lord a Jew had asked in vain from 
another Jew; they had invented a money: 
small squares of tin, worth about the tenth of 
a half-penny, with which they could be gen- 
erous. 

The eternal lamentation dominated this 
pious poverty. It is no exaggeration to say 
that in Jerusalem, each day was a day of 
mourning. The spring and the summer espe- 
cially! For in those seasons favorable to 
military expeditions, the city suffered from 
many terrible disasters and the commemora- 
tion of those ancient calamities made the 
pleasantest seasons the saddest part of the 
year. Between Easter and Pentecost, they 
were in half-mourning, in remembrance of 
the twenty-four thousand pupils of Reb 
Akida massacred by the Romans. After the 
seventeenth day of Tammuz, another period 
of three weeks’ mourning, till Tische Beav. 


[ 1527 


Pe AS GNG OB) JD BA 


Then, a great lamentation in memory of the 
destruction of the Temple by Titus. A 
month before Rosh Hashana, a new explo- 
sion of sorrow which gathered strength as 
the terrible days of Yom Kippur approached. 
In the middle of the night the shofar was 
heard and the voice of the Shames shouting, 
awoke everybody from their  slumbers: 
“Awake, now is the hour. Go and worship 
the Lord!’ In slippers, as it is written, and 
with a lantern in their hands, the moribund 
old men went through the narrow streets 
where Arab urchins had scattered ground 
glass. At the foot of the Wall or in the 
synagogues, they could be heard uttering the 
secular lamentation: “My heart groaneth 
when I see every town proudly built on its hill 
and the city of God lowered into the 
abyss! ...” 

There was no more washing, no more cut- 
ting of hair, no giving in marriage, only a 
continual fasting. At least it was good for 
the slender resources of the ghetto. Every 
place outside the walls seemed to the Jews to 


[ 153] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


be full of ambushes and dangers, just as if Ti- 
tus’ army were still encamping outside the 
gates of the city. During that period of 
mourning Jerusalem consisted only of the 
Wall of Wailing and the vast burial ground, 
which covers the hill, on the other side of 
Kedron, with its tombs where the Jews found 
their eternal rest after having prayed there 
all their lives. They never went outside the 
walls except on Saturday, the day of the 
dead, to go and pray among the tombs. 
There was once an old, blind man, who almost 
every day had his son take him far away into 
the country, telling him as they went: “Four 
steps more, my child, on our Ancestors’ 
ground, thus we shall please God!’ He was, 
of course, thought to be eccentric. 

In the town itself they seldom left the be- 
loved quarter of the synagogues and their 
blue-painted houses. Why should they go to 
the impure quarters? What could they see 
there? Nothing very agreeable! Maybe 
Mohammedans, who up there, on the sacred 
Esplanade, walked over the ground of the 


1547 





DEE SOO Na OR id LD EA 


Holy of Holies, poisoning with their prayers 
the place of David’s sacrifices, or maybe 
Christians who made a god of the greatest 
traitor among the Jews. 

From time to time, some great Israelite 
millionaires and philanthropists came there, 
and the fanaticism and poverty touched their 
hearts. With the pride of the Western Jew, 
who does not pray or prays unostentatiously, 
who washes and knows how to eat properly, 
they were ashamed of this Jewry living in its 
pious abjection, like Job on his manure-heap, 
and wondered how the life of the ghetto could 
be transformed and how those professional 
beggars and lamentators could be made into 
ordinary, decent people. One of them opened 
a school; another imported weaving-machines 
from England at enormous expense, with a 
German engineer to show them how to use 
them; another brought water to the town and 
built better houses outside the walls; another 
thought he could cause the old antagonism 
between Ashkenazim and Sephardim to dis- 
appear by giving them five pounds of sterling 


[155] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


each time they intermarried. In spite of the 
five pounds, Ashkenazim and Sephardim did 
not marry; the weaving-machines were left 
unassembled, their parts lying around in the 
dust; nobody left the ghetto to live outside 
the walls and as soon as a school was opened, 
the shofar was sounded, anathema was ut- 
tered against the director, the teachers and 
the parents, who would send their children to 
it, The utensils used for washing corpses 
and the stretchers for the dead were brought 
and laid outside the school. 


Ben Yehouda arrived in this old ruin with 
his new madness. He wanted to teach a new 
tongue to people who hated each other, be- 
cause they could not agree about the manner 
of cleaning chickens; and people who loved 
their Yiddish and their Spanish as the dia- 
lects of their beloved pasts, he wanted to 
unite by a superior conception of the Messiah! 
What indignation, what scandal this sickly- 
looking Jew created! He never spoke any- 
thing but Hebrew everywhere he went and 


[1567 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


no matter to whom he talked. They called 
him a lunatic, children ran after him in the 
streets, and in the synagogue there was al- 
ways a furious fanatic ready to assemble the 
faithful to the sound of the shofar and heap 
curses on this impious person who degraded 
the sacred tongue by using it in ordinary 
speech. 

He remained unperturbed, saying his 
prayers, his forehead hidden by the tallith, 
doing everything that pious people did. He 
went out in the street with his head covered 
by the black-and-white scarf worn by the real 
devotees. It is true that after having lived a 
long time with a Catholic Pole and after hav- 
ing listened entranced to Gambetta, Jules 
Ferry and Clemenceau, one can’t believe in 
much. This Son of Judea believed only in the 
miracle that words would make the He- 
brews a nation again. When they drove him 
out of one synagogue, he went to another. 
Repulsed by the Ashkenazim, he went to the 
Sephardim, then he abandoned altogether the 


[1577 


CG OMT We CPO Te eal IN uly UR OP aS A io a 


tallith and the phylacteries and gave up going 
to the synagogues. 

Poverty reigned at home. 'Twenty francs a 
month to live on was very little even in Jeru- 
salem where a chicken could be bought at 
that time for four sous. Poor Deborah, ac- 
customed to the ease of a well-to-do family 
in Moscow, found herself suddenly plunged 
into the hardest kind of Jewish life. And 
things went rather badly with the Pole. When 
he arrived, he stayed at a small hotel near the 
Tower of David. What happened? Did he 
fall in love with Deborah or was he jealous 
because he was not any more the only one to 
watch over Eliezer, or could he not bear life 
any longer in this town of madmen? One 
morning Ben Yehouda, going to see him as he 
did every day found no one at home. The 
enigmatic Pole had gone the day before, 
leaving no address, and to this day no one 
knows what became of him. Ben Yehouda’s 
friend had disappeared, soon his money would 
disappear too. The editor of The Rose of 
Sharon could not keep this madman, who was 


[158] 


De Se ONO Res UD) EA 


ruining his paper, very much longer. He dis- 
charged him. In this town to which the Son 
of Judea had come in order to resurrect 
a lost language, and among these people who 
remained as deaf to his voice as the dead of 
the Kedron valley, there remained only one 
man interested in him, who would speak to 
him without cursing him. His name was 
Pines. He was a Lithuanian, a well-read 
man himself who after long stays in France 
and Germany had come lately to settle in 
Palestine. He had written in Hebrew a 
work famous among the intellectuals of the 
ghetto, “The Children of My Mind,” in 
which he defended traditional Judaism, 
and on that point he did not resemble the 
unbeliever, Ben Yehouda, but he found pleas- 
ure in discussions with him in the desert of 
Judea. 

“You are wrong,” he said, “to rebel against 
all the people here. The practices and rites 
which excite your indignation are as neces- 
sary to us as a wick to a candle. How do 
you think Israel can continue to exist if it 


p59 


SUN OUR ee Ake IN te ie OS) A Es 


gives up its beliefs? A people who own their 
own country can live without religion, but our 
scattered people have only their adherence to 
their faith to unite them. I love the Hebrew 
language as much as you do, but do not make 
it an instrument for our own destruction. 
Don’t let us give up our souls for the pleasure 
of enjoying the ancient Hebrew words. 
Don’t let us deprive them of all the precious 
meanings which make our greatness. ‘The 
Hebrew you want us to speak would be a 
language a hundred times more dead than it 
is to-day, if when we use it constantly it 
expresses no longer the thoughts and feelings 
it has carried throughout the world.” 

Ben Yehouda told his friend that for him 
the religious spirit was not the whole of 
Israel, but the passing form of a supple and 
varied genius only waiting to express itself 
with a new force till it had found its own 
language and its own country again. Be- 
tween these two men with such different 
thoughts but with the same ideals that had 
brought them both to Jerusalem, the discus- 


[160] 





Ly Eh Sas re INS OF FCT Ee A 





sion went on interminably, just as formerly 
they had argued ceaselessly in the Yeshivas of 
Lithuania. 


Deborah was going to be a mother and 
good old Pines used to tell her when he found 
her alone: “Deborah, as you are going to 
have a child, try to persuade your husband 
to let him learn a living language so that 
he won’t be an idiot!” But the fanatic used 
to answer: “Let him be an idiot! We'll 
have another child! He shall speak He- 
brew!’ The child was born, a boy, and he 
had to be circumcised. Pines got a Sephar- 
dim Rabbi to perform the operation, no Ash- 
kenazim would have agreed to do it. When, 
in accordance with the rites, the Rabbi asked: 
“What name do you wish to give to your 
son?” Ben Yehouda did not give one of those 
good old Jewish names which, all through 
life, bring luck to those who bear them, Abra- 
ham, Jacob or Moses. Thinking of the new 
race which would spring some day from the 
old Hebraic tree, through the mysterious vir- 


[1614] 


“NEAL Y BARING JEROSAL EM?’ 


tue of the beloved language born again, he 
invented a name which had never before been 
heard in a synagogue: “Ithamar, that is to 
say, Trunk of a Palm-Tree!” The godfather 
nearly let the child drop from his arms! 

Three years went by and it seemed as if 
Jehovah Himself wanted to show His anger, 
for the three-year-old Ithamar had not ut- 
tered a word, neither in Hebrew nor in any 
other language. Wise Pines used to say: 
“Do speak to him in some other language but 
Hebrew and maybe he will answer.” One 
day when Deborah was telling Pines her sor- 
rows and her fear that the Lord was trying to 
chastise her husband because of his audacious 
sacrileges by giving them a mute son, a billy- 
goat went near the child. Ithamar, fright- 
ened, ran to his mother at once shouting in 
perfect Hebrew: “Mamma! Mamma!’ 
Blessed goat of Israel! It was the first He- 
brew word uttered by a child for centuries, as 
a word of his mother tongue. ‘This word 
being “mamma,” how could one help seeing a 
symbol in it! 

[162] 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


Five children followed the first. These 
births and tuberculosis wore out Deborah. 
Ben Yehouda was still fighting his co- 
religionists. In his small paper, Glory, he 
was attacking the Holy Halouka, shaming 
the people of the ghetto because they lived 
by begging. It was the breaking-point. The 
madman could talk Hebrew with his family 
if he liked, but to attack the charity which 
enabled everybody to live! To represent the 
pious people of the Wall, the wailers of the 
Holy City, as lazy and unworthy of Israel’s 
bounties! All the shofars sounded. In the 
great mosque of Ashkenazim Jews, candles 
wrapped in black cloth were lighted and the 
antique formula of excommunication was 
pronounced against this impious one, this 
scorner of sacred usages. “Let Ben Yehouda 
be excommunicated according to the judg- 
ment of the Lord God in the two tribunals, 
the higher one and the lower! Let calami- 
ties fall upon him! May his house be inhab- 
ited by dragons! May his star be hidden by 
clouds and may it be full of anger and fury 


[163 7 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


against him! Let his body be thrown to the 
serpents, his gold and his silver taken away 
from him. Let his wife be given to others 
and let others lie with her! May he be 
cursed through the mouths of Addirion and 
Achtariel, Gabriel and Seraphie, Raphael 
and Mecharetiel! May he fall and never rise 
again! Let him not be buried in Israel’s 
burying-ground! Let this excommunication 
rest upon him and his descendants! But let 
all Israel be blessed with the peace and bless- 
ings of the Lord!” At the end of the cere- 
mony the candles were put out to show that 
the accursed was henceforth excluded from 
the light of Heaven. 

The next day, the excommunicated one 
wrote in Glory an article beginning in this 
way: “I am dead, but I still live!” His 
wife threw herself at his feet, she felt death 
coming. “Eliezer, please go and ask pardon, 
because if you die you will be buried like a 
donkey and so shall the children and myself!” 
Once more Pines intervened. He obtained 
from the Sephardim, who are a little more 


[ 164] 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


open-minded, the concession that no anath- 
ema should be pronounced against Ben Ye- 
houda in their synagogue and this concession 
made the last days of Deborah a little hap- 
pier. She saw death coming and she was 
asking herself in anguish what would happen 
to her husband and her five children in the 
midst of so much hatred when she was dead. 
Then she had an idea, one of those ideas that 
can come only to one in the depths of misery, 
when there is nothing near to rely upon. ) 
Deborah wrote to her mother to come from 
Moscow. She came and was astonished to 
discover the poverty that Deborah had man- 
aged to hide from her and to find her daugh- 
ter dying. That was not all, for, as a supreme 
consolation, Deborah asked that her sister 
should leave the family to come to Jerusalem 
and marry her husband, the tubercular, the 
accursed, to lead the kind of life which had 
brought her, Deborah, to an early grave. 
Her burial was a tragic affair, for except 
for the devoted Pines, nobody followed the 
coffin of the woman who spoke only Hebrew! 


[165 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


On Mount Zion, at the turn of the road one 
follows to go down to the valley of Josa- 
phat, the place from where one can see the 
Mount of Olives, an Ashkenazim mob which 
had gathered there shouted that they would 
not allow the body to proceed further, to pol- 
Jute the holy burial ground of their dead. 
They threw stones! Was poor Deborah go- 
ing to have a donkey’s funeral, after all, as 
she had feared? The frightened pallbearers 
let their burden fall, and Ben Yehouda 
thought for an instant that he would have to 
retrace his steps and bury his dead in his own 
ground. But some pitying Sephardim took 
up the coffin and Pines calmed down the in- 
furiated mob. ‘They stopped stoning the 
coffin and the cortege was allowed to proceed 
to the valley of Kedron. Under the burning 
sun, amid the innumerable tombs, they went 
up the hill and Deborah was buried in the 
last grave, in a very remote corner, and 
on her tombstone the Son of Judea placed 
the following words which expressed his love 
and his hope which did not yield even to 


r 166 7 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


death: ‘To Deborah, the first mother of the 
newly reborn Jewish people!” 


Some months later, in Constantinople, 
Ben Yehouda married Deborah’s sister. He 
came back with her to Palestine and his mis- 
eries began all over again. On the anniver- 
sary of the Maccabees, he wrote an article 
full of enthusiastic nationalism; in the name 
of the glorious martyrs he asked that the 
Ancestral Land be given back to its rightful 
owners, the Jews. ‘This wish left the old 
Jews of the ghetto absolutely indifferent; they 
were satisfied with the Wall as long as they 
were allowed to wail there, but they saw in 
that article a chance of getting rid of a man 
who offended them daily. They denounced 
him to the Turks. It is not the first time 
that the Jews of the synagogue have turned 
to Pontius Pilate. ... Ben Yehouda was 
condemned to fifteen years’ hard labor. ‘Two 
policemen entered the room on the very day 
his wife was having her first child and took 
him to prison. He appealed, but in order to 


[ 167 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


be allowed out while waiting for the sen- 
tence, he had to secure bail for two hundred 
pounds. Where was he to find anybody who 
would put up two hundred pounds? ‘Twice 
already the clerk of the court had asked: 
“Who will go bail for Ben Yehouda?” with- 
out any answer, when a pilgrim from Moroc- 
co, who happened by chance to be there, de- 
clared that he would go bail for him. He 
did it out of pity, as he had never heard of 
Ben Yehouda before. Just then the rain that 
had been expected for three months began to 
fall, and superstitious people, who in the 
bottom of their hearts were sorry to have be- 
trayed a member of their race to the Turks, 
attributed this favor from Heaven to his 
deliverance. 

Blessed rain! All that happened at the 
time when Theodore Herzl was sowing in 
the world the idea that one could bring back 
Israel’s unity through political means, that 
unity which the Son of Judea was trying to 
_ bring about by restoring the Hebrew lan- 
guage and the Hebrew genius. The two 


[168 4 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


movements were akin to each other. The 
new Jewish people needed a language. 
Would they be mad enough to give prefer- 
ence to English, French or German, slighting 
Hebrew? It was the same problem that they 
had already faced when choosing a country. 
Herzl would have accepted English as he 
accepted Uganda because he had never really 
belonged to the ghetto. The people who fol- 
lowed him were more deeply imbued with 
Jewish feeling and loved the language and 
the country of their ancestors equally. ‘To 
them, the Son of Judea, the madman of 
Jerusalem, who was the first to speak only 
Hebrew with his family, became a hero, the 
hero of the resurrection of Israel. They 
thought with gratitude of this man who, 
through the worst tribulations, went on with 
his immense undertaking to write a dictionary 
of the Hebraic language—not a tomb of 
words, but a building full of life, to house all 
the modern ideas, feelings and other things 
unknown in ancient times. 

The old Jews of Jerusalem went on turn- 


r 1694 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


ing away with the same horror as before from 
the schools founded outside the walls by phi- 
lanthropists from the Occident, but the people 
who arrived in Palestine as the forerunners 
of the scattered people sent their children 
there. The most important one had been 
founded a long time before by the Universal 
Jewish Alliance and the teaching was given 
there in French. In order to harm this school, 
the Germans, in their turn, opened a school 
and in order to draw pupils they announced 
that all the teaching would be done in He- 
brew, but when success followed they changed 
their tactics, gave only one or two hours a 
week to Hebrew and replaced it by German. 
Then there was a revolt, the first revolt in 
Jerusalem since Bar-Kochba and _ Reb- 
Akida. It was a children’s revolt. Boys and 
girls destroyed their copy-books and their 
books and left the school in a riot, and as 
this took place on the day of the Maccabees, 
the rebellious schoolgirls brought to Ben Ye- 
houda a beautiful seven-branched candlestick 


[1707 


THE ISON ORY JO DEA 


with its candles lighted, while outside the 
boys sang Israel’s song of hope. 

After this coup d'état, a very limited num- 
ber of pupils went back to the Germans. 
With the National Fund, purely Hebraic 
schools were opened. ‘They have multiplied 
since Balfour’s Declaration. In the same 
Palestine where, forty years ago, the Son of 
Judea, poor and tubercular, arrived full of 
enthusiasm with the faithful Deborah and the 
unfaithful Pole, everybody to-day speaks 
Hebrew except the old men of the ghetto. It 
is the official language of the country, to- 
gether with Arabic and English. The first 
gesture of the Zionists on the Ancestral Land 
was to put up a symbol to this resurrection 
of the Jewish mind and the Jewish language. 
Up there on the Mount of Olives overlooking 
the valley of Josaphat, the Mosque of Omar, 
the Holy Sepulcher and all Jerusalem, they 
have laid twelve stones—one for each tribe 
of Israel—the twelve foundation-stones of 
the First Hebrew University. 

Ben Yehouda died recently. The death of 


171 J 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


a poor tubercular Jew in Jerusalem and his 
burial in the Kedron valley was an event 
which created no stir in the world. The 
newspaper that brought me the information 
said that he was given a magnificent funeral. 
I accompanied him in imagination along the 
road followed once by poor Deborah. Did 
his corpse feel anything when the place was 
reached where the infuriated Ashkenazim 
stoned her coffin? What did old Sonnenfeld 
think when he saw, through the bars of his 
window, a great crowd behind the Zionist 
banners escorting to his tomb the accursed 
one against whom he had so often sounded 
his shofar? I saw him again, in his room, 
the small, weak, dying man, surrounded by 
the files and the indexes of his monumental 
Dictionary, where every word of Hebrew has 
its history, or its newly acquired pedigree re- 
corded, Ben Yehouda being very like a chem- 
ist who has just found a powerful explosive. 
What will be the fate of those words raised 
from the dead? What future is in store for 
those old servants of Adonai? Will they be 


[172] 


THE SON OF JUDEA 


used to clothe in an oriental form the banal 
thoughts of Western civilization? Or will 
they be used to teach new truths and shall we 
see because of them a renewal of the genius 
of the Prophets? Will they give a voice to 
the Jews all over the world or will they sim- 
ply be the means of imprisoning them in a 
spiritual ghetto, narrower than the old one? 
Will this new kind of powder, word powder, 
upset the universe, or will it be only the wet 
fuse of useless fireworks? 


[1737 





THE STORY OF SARAH 


4 + Pi tas 
iy ee as i 


Pe ‘ " ; 

Pe) es ae ae 
ne eas ’ 
Vireo my 





CHAPTER IX 
THE STORY OF SARAH 


Tuis drama has for its setting the most 
romantic spot in the world. I went there, one 
morning, from Haifa, over a road running 
through a narrow plain lying between the sea 
and the mountain-range of Mount Carmel. 
The drive in a, carriage lasts one hour. Part 
of the time a rocky cliff makes a kind of wall 
along the seacoast and hides the Mediterra- 
nean; then one comes upon a breach in the cliff 
itself, Just wide enough for two horsemen. 
Once through this pass, one is separated from 
the sea only by a narrow stretch of low and 
marshy land. There on a rocky peninsula, 
one can see the remains of one of those 
Frankish forts, which from Mount Moab 
down to the Mediterranean, from the Taurus 
to Mount Sinai, are the remnants of the great 
defeat which the Occident suffered in these 
parts. It is the fort of Athlit which is pro- 


Curry 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


tected by a small inlet, where the vessels of 
the Crusaders once found shelter. In Syria, 
in Tripoli, in Markhab, on Kalaat el Hoson 
and even on the river Euphrates, I have seen 
much more awe-inspiring ruins than this 
Frankish fort that I saw from an aeroplane, 
so isolated, so forsaken and the name of which 
I can’t even recall. What gives more melan- 
choly grandeur to this ruin of Athlit than to 
any other castle of the Holy Land is the 
thought that these lofty ruined walls saw the 
supreme moment of the Kingdom of Jeru- 
salem. The last Frankish knight embarked 
here after one hundred years of strife carry- 
ing away with him the bitterness of wasted 
effort. 

It happened seven centuries ago and since 
then nothing has happened in this ruin except 
the falling of stones, the slow disintegration 
of everything, the smothering of the past 
under parasitic plants and the trivial events 
which from birth to death ‘(both included) 
fill the existence of some Bedouin families 
camped with their goats and asses in those 


r178 J 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


parts haunted with memories of the distant 
past. Nothing, that is, until the story of 
Sarah. 

On the other side of the cliff, just opposite 
the breach made in the rock, the breach being 
like the gate of a rampart, a long drive bor- 
dered with palm-trees can be seen, very much 
like those one sees on the Cdte d’ Azur lead- 
ing to some beautiful house. Palm-trees are 
rarely seen in Palestine and in the naked 
plain this beautiful drive, looking as if it 
belonged to some casino, is quite out of keep- 
ing with its surroundings. It leads to a very 
simple-looking house, some outhouses and 
an artesian well with its wheel. It is all de- 
serted, abandoned. The impassibility of the 
ruin of Athlit, its indifference to everything 
that has happened since its adventure of long 
ago, is replaced here by a very human 
sadness, as if it had hardly recovered yet from 
some terrible blow. ‘The doors, the closed 
windows, some agricultural implements which 
are rusting under an outhouse, the well 
where a pail is still hanging at the end of the 


[1794 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


rope, the wheel at the top of its shaft, which 
begins turning with a slight creaking—there 
is a strangeness and everywhere there is an 
uneasy, uncanny silence about that ordinary- 
looking house at the end of its pretentious 
drive, the kind of silence that surrounds the 
events that took place there. 

Before the war an agricultural engineer 
called Aaron Aronsohn lived there. The 
Aronsohn family belonged to a group of 
Roumanian Jews who had settled in Palestine 
about fifty years ago. Their beginnings had 
been very difficult. A Roumanian company 
had bought from Samarin two to three hun- | 
dred acres of land, half of which was plow- 
ing-land and the remainder for vineyards and 
olive-trees. The locality was healthy, about 
three hundred and sixty feet above sea-level, 
in a very agreeable spot from where on one 
side the Mediterranean could be seen, and, 
on the other, the rich plain which rises slowly 
to the mountain-range of Mount Carmel. 
There was room for about twenty families. 
Sixty arrived, about one hundred and twenty- 


[ 180] 


THE STORY OF SARAH 





five people who soon found themselves 
stranded, without money, the funds of the 
company having been just enough to pay for 
the land and the journey. ‘There was no 
place where they could house themselves, just 
a few wooden huts and the greater part of the 
emigrants had to stay in Haifa in extreme 
poverty. Some of them, more robust than 
the rest, settled in Samarin. They were for 
the most part drivers of coaches, ruined by 
the building of railways, who had from time 
to time done some work for landowners, so 
they had acquired some experience in culti- 
vating the land. Their efforts did not accom- 
plish much and like all the colonists who were 
settling in Palestine at that time they were 
on the point of going under when the Baron 
Edmund de Rothschild came to their rescue. 
He adopted the people of Samarin as he had 
adopted many others. From that moment 
the colony, which had changed its name for 
the more harmonious one of Zichron-Jacob, 
Jacob’s Remembrance, had led a sheltered 
and uneventful existence, the peaceful life 


[ 181 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


of the Rothschild’s foundations. To-day, 
Zichron-Jacob, with its beautiful view, its 
three thousand acres of land and its comfort- 
able villas, is really an agreeable spot, “a 
small Switzerland,” as the J ews there call it, 
though, of course, they are as prone to exag- 
gerate as the people of Marseilles. 

The Aronsohns were typical of those first 
emigrants. They led quietly the life of the 
bourgeois, a thing that always exasperates 
the modern Jews of Palestine. The head of 
the family had four children: Aaron and 
Alexander, Sarah and Rebecca. He never 
dreamed of making peasants out of his sons 
and Aaron was sent to France, to the agricul- 
tural institute of Montpellier. He came back 
with his diploma of an engineer. While in 
Jerusalem Ben Yehouda was fighting to make 
his race accept Hebrew as their every-day 
language, Aaron Aronsohm was going round 
the country studying the fauna and the flora 
of Palestine, its resources of every kind and 
the means by which the country could be re- 
vived if some day it were given back to its 


[ 182 7 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


rightful owners. He was a small man, his 
face as square as his body, clean-shaven, 
sunburnt, with untidy red hair falling all 
over his forehead, very thick-lipped, heavy- 
jowled, with teeth on which dentists had en- 
crusted a lot of gold, hairy hands, in short, a 
red bull. He was intellectually energetic, 
full of confidence in himself, very dogmatic, 
rather sarcastic and with a natural bent for 
advertising and bluff. In the course of his 
travels through the Hauran, he found a plant 
which he called wild wheat. He thought that 
by cultivating it the food resources of the 
world could be enormously increased. He left 
Palestine at once to introduce his remarkable 
wheat to all the capitals of Europe. The 
botanists of Berlin and Paris were not very 
enthusiastic about his find. He went to 
America where it is easier to make an impres- 
sion. ‘There he interested in his plans some 
Jews who gave him enough money to create 
in Palestine an experimental farm. That 
was the origin of the trial-station, the Station, 
as it was called, the place that I saw in the 


[183] 


ee 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM?’ 


plain of Athlit as dead and as desolate as the 
old Frankish fort. 


Some years before the war, a young man 
of a very different stamp joined him there. 
He was, like Aronsohn, a Palestinian Jew, 
born on one of the Baron’s colonies. Absalom 
Feinberg had also gone to France to perfect 
his education but the resemblance stopped 
there. He was very unsettled, very much 
attracted by literature and philosophy, filled 
with an ardor which had not yet found an 
outlet. What is truth? On what basis should 
he build his life? Such were the thoughts 
which in 1906 filled his mind in the streets of 
Paris, while he was seeking the Absolute. 
Catholicism attracted and repelled him at the 
same time. A Frenchman, a friend of his, 
used to say to him: “Pray, my dear Absalom, 
and you'll find God!” He told him this in a 
garden of a Paris suburb and Feinberg went 
down on his knees on the gravel and began 
invoking Christ with the fervor of an Ortho- 
dox Greek calling for the Sacred Fire or 


[184] 


RHR OSLORY) OF SARAH 


any of the Jews at the Wall of Wailing. But 
after half an hour, God having not revealed 
Himself, Feinberg stopped praying, his 
knees ached and he was sadly disillusioned. 
He dreamt also of going to America and 
becoming immensely rich so that he could 
press the power of money into service for his 
dreams. In the end, he did not become a 
Catholic, he did not go to America, he simply 
went back to Palestine. At the Station he 
became Aaron Aronsohn’s secretary and 
shortly after that he became engaged to the 
youngest sister, Rebecca. The life he led in 
that out-of-the-way place, occupied with 
things so unlike his tastes, must have ap- 
peared very miserable to him after all the 
high hopes he had entertained. Yet, the 
reason why he should be alive, which he had 
been seeking in vain in the streets of Paris, 
was given to him, in that lost corner, at the 
foot of the wheel of the artesian well, at the 
end of the drive of palm-trees. 


The idea that Palestine should belong to 
the Jews formed an integral part of Absa- 


[ 185 J 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


lom’s being, but that idea had hitherto been 
too dependent upon the chances of inter- 
national politics to attract and hold his atten- 
tion. The War changed his point of view. 
By proclaiming that they were fighting for 
oppressed nationalities, the Allies seemed to 
have done away with such unimportant things 
as political difficulties. Henceforth, it ap- 
peared, success did not depend upon the 
precarious good-will of foreign governments 
but solely upon Israel’s faith and energy. 
As it was a question of sacrifice and devotion, 
he gave himself entirely to the cause. | 

But he could not serve the cause in the soli- 
tude of Athlit. Feinberg left the Station, 
succeeded in reaching Kgypt and proposed to 
the English authorities there that they organ- 
ize in Palestine a secret service. ‘They agreed 
and he went back to Athlit. But weeks and 
months passed while Aaron and he watched 
in vain from the Station for the English boat 
which was to communicate with them by 
means of prearranged signals. ‘Then they 
both decided to disguise themselves as 


r 186 7 





THE STORY OF SARAH 


Bedouins, to go through the Sinai desert on 
camels and through the lines to Cairo. They 
started. The Turks arrested them and they 
were brought to Djemal, Governor of Syria. 
Aronsohn, who knew him, took the adventure 
as a joke and with his usual self-assurance 
told him that he was just going through the 
desert in order to investigate certain swarms 
of locusts which had been brought to his 
notice. Djemal did not suspect him. This 
young Turk, hard and suspicious and very 
intelligent, let himself be imposed upon by 
the scientific reputation of the agricultural 
expert. He freed the two friends and shortly 
after gave Aronsohn permission to go to Ger- 
many where he was to pursue his researches. 
This journey had been planned to enable 
them to reestablish communication with 
Egypt. From Berlin, Aronsohn went to 
Copenhagen and embarked on a Scandina- 
vian vessel for America. In the North Sea 
the boat was searched by an English man-of- 
war. Aronsohn was arrested as a subject of 
an enemy nation, was taken to London and 


[187] 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


there he established his identity, enlisted in 
the British army and was sent to the Egyp- 
tian front. 

This odyssey had lasted about seven or 
eight months. In Athlit, Feinberg was 
beginning to lose patience and was thinking 
of trying again his unlucky attempt of the 
year before. He confided his ambition to 
Sarah Aronsohn, the elder sister of his fiancée, 
Rebecca, Rebecca being in London where 
the War had caught her unawares. Sarah was 
a woman about thirty years old who had 
married, in Constantinople, a Bulgarian Jew. 
She had not been able to get on with this 
coarse-grained man and had come back to her 
father and to the colony of Zichron-Jacob 
where she had always lived. She tried to dis- 
suade Absalom from such an enterprise, re- 
minding him of the dangers of the road he 
would have to follow, the hanging that would 
be his fate if he were caught again, pointing 
out that he was endangering all the Jews in 
Palestine if the Turks found out that a Jew 
was conspiring against them and finally talk- 


[188 7 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


ing of the sorrow of Rebecca if anything 
should happen to him. Absalom persisted in 
his idea and, accompanied by a friend, a boy 
called Lichansky, he started again over the 
dangerous roads. 

They crossed the desert without mishap 
and were in sight of the British lines when a 
patrol of Bedouins and Turks signaled to 
them to stop. Instead of obeying they in- 
creased the pace of their mounts. The Turks 
pursued them, firing the while. Absalom fell, 
mortally wounded. His companion was 
struck by three bullets, but was able to 
remain in the saddle and to reach the first 
English post. He was carried to Cairo and 
it was there that Aronsohn who had just ar- 
rived found him in a hospital. They agreed 
on means of communication. As soon as he 
was on his feet again Lichansky went back 
to Palestine on an English boat which left 
him at night in the small bay of Athlit. 

Then a terrible life began for Sarah 
Aronsohn, for now that Absalom was dead, 
she assumed the responsibility of going on 


[189] 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


with his work, securing information and con- 
veying it to the English: “My heart is always 
trembling,” she wrote in a letter I saw, “be- 
cause we are doing perilous work and are 
always in danger. It is difficult for me to 
write about our misfortune (she was thinking 
of Absalom’s death) it is so great and there 
is no consolation. Our dear one gave his 
blood, he gave his life for a sacred cause. But 
the sacrifice is too great, even if we succeed 
and if Israel’s redemption rewards our ef- 
forts, even then I won’t be consoled. If our 
friend were alive still and if he had heard 
that the Allies were ready to give Palestine 
back to us, how happy he would have been! 
We have this happiness and it was he who 
ran all the risks. Here I am, taking part in 
the work, I am not afraid of danger, I am as 
hard as iron. Sometimes I feel like an inor- 
ganic force, otherwise how could I bear such 
a sacrifice? I am going on with what our 
dear one began and I’ll have my revenge, a 
great revenge on both the savages of the 
wilderness and on the savages of the cities.” 


r 190 4 


Pde SOR Ys OBS A RATT 


Urged by Aronsohn, from time to time the 
English sent a ship to lie off Athlit. A canoe 
would leave it at night and land on the beach, 
at the foot of the ruined fort of the Crusaders. 
People hiding among the rocks would watch 
for its arrival to give the sailors the informa- 
tion gathered by Sarah and her companions, 
but the ship did not always arrive when due. 
Sarah used to despair: “This is the fifth 
night,” she wrote to her brother, “that our 
men have gone out and waited till morning 
without any results. They come back dis- 
heartened, irritated, discouraged. ‘To risk 
one’s life is hard enough, but to risk it for 
nothing is worse. We spend a lot of energy 
and money to get news and they are not on 
time. To go to the bay is not easy, for, as you 
know, it is courting death. The English do 
not come, they are afraid of risking their men. 
When they send a canoe they have hardly 
touched shore when they leave, and yet we 
expose our men for whole nights. I am mis- 
erable when I see them coming back after 
useless waiting! One fear haunts me, is the 


[191] 


t 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


thing worth while? Will our people really 
receive something in return for the lives we 
put in jeopardy by helping the English? 
You know that we expose to danger not only 
our heads but a lot of others, those of the 
whole population, in fact....’ As her brother 
had been sending her soap and some toilet 
accessories, since he knew they had none, she 
begged him not to do it again. “Our people 
do not risk their lives for such frivolities. 
Please send me a revolver.” 

Time went on. ‘The English army en- 
camped in front of Gaza for months and 
months without attacking, in spite of Sarah’s 
, reports which showed that the Turkish army 
was completely demoralized and incapable 
of withstanding the shock of an attack. From 
day to day, the situation was becoming more 
and more desperate. Djemal knew that a 
band of spies was at work in Palestine and in 
his violent anger when he learned that Aron- 
sohn had abused his confidence threatened all 
the Jews. So that was the way they acted, 
those people that Turkey had always made 


[1927 


TAIT) ihe Oe ee Olde) mia te A ED 


welcome, who had found shelter with her 
when they were being massacred elsewhere. 
And Aaron Aronsohn who had pretended to 
be his friend, to whom he had given a pass- 
port and who had gone over to the English! 
.. In the first flush of his anger he wanted 
to put to the sword all the Jews in the coun- 
try, Just as Titus had done, and he was the 
kind of man to put his threat into effect if he 
had not been afraid that he would have the 
opinion of the whole world against him. 
But the Jews, who up to that time had led 
a peaceful existence, having been able to es- 
cape requisitions and military service by 
giving baksheesh, were now less fortunate. 
In the towns and in the country, the ancient 
dread of the pogroms, that they thought had 
been left behind for ever when they aban- 
doned Russia, reappeared very much more 
quickly than it had stopped. The Jews 
knew that the Aronsohns’ house was head- 
quarters for the spies and they had a grudge 
against them because of the risk they made 
everybody run. Sarah felt the hostility 


[193 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


everywhere around her and she knew that 
some day she might be betrayed by her own 
people. Luckily for her, the English were 
going to attack, but would they do it soon 
enough? Each day, each hour that went by 
increased the danger. “Not one second is to 
be lost,” she wrote to her brother. “They 
must come before September 27th. Who 
knows whether they will find me alive then? 
The situation is becoming worse and worse. 
Our Jews themselves are the cause of my 
uneasiness. ‘They are all indignant and 
frightened. It may be possible that they 
are ready to betray us to Djemal. Please 
have pity upon us, act quickly, come soon, do 
not abandon us... .” 

During this period of agonized waiting 
the Feast of Succoth arrived. This feast 
commemorates the period when the He- 
brews were wandering in the wilderness 
before entering the Land of Canaan and is 
one of the rare occasions on which Israel lets 
itself be joyful. In those blissful days, sad 
Jerusalem itself, the city where one hears 


p94 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


only lamentations from one end of the year 
to the other, forgets its sorrow and takes on 
an air of something like gayety. Bedouin 
women bring from the country branches of 
green oak and cypresses. With sheets and 
branches they improvise in the yards of the 
houses huts decorated with paper flowers, 
lemons, citrons and Jaffa oranges. For a 
week people stay there, drinking and danc- 
ing. On the eighth day of the festival, the 
day of the Feast of the Law, the reading of 
the books of Moses in the synagogues reaches 
the end, the next day they begin reading them 
again from the beginning. So that the days 
of Succoth symbolize for the Jews the re- 
newal of life centering around the ancient 
Prophet who had led his people according to 
the wishes of God, through all their time of 
stress, to leave them only on the day when 
the gates of their new country were opened 
for them.... 

In the village of Zichron-Jacob the houses 
were decorated and according to custom the 
young people were dancing under the foliage. 


[1954 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


What could the thoughts of Sarah have been 
while she listened to the sounds of the violin? 
Would the Allied troops decide at last to 
attack to-day or to-morrow? Was the long 
wandering of Israel through the wilderness 
drawing to its close? Just as long ago in 
the time of Moses, Palestine was given to the 
ancient Hebrews, would a new Palestine be 
given to the renascent Hebrew people? Was 
this feast of Succoth to mark the end of 
the long exile? Was the sacrifice of Absalom 
going to have its reward?... 

Sarah was standing at her door with some 
young girls, when the violins suddenly 
stopped. The approach of the Kaimakam of 
Nazareth and some Turkish troops had been 
discovered. All the young men disappeared 
in the orchards, since not one of them had 
complied with the military regulations. The 
girls around Sarah were frightened. She 
alone was quite calm and reassured her 
friends, yet she knew quite well why the sol- 
diers were coming. In a few seconds the 
village was surrounded. ‘The Kaimakam dis- 


[ 196 7 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


mounted in front of Aronsohn’s house. He 
asked for Lichansky and Sarah answered 
that he was not thero. 

The soldiers searched the house and finding 
no one seized Sarah’s father, made him lie 
on the ground, tied his hands and feet to two 
guns, forced Sarah and her younger brother 
Alexander to hold him down and began whip- 
ping him. ‘The old man moaned. Then 
Sarah became afraid, afraid that he might 
speak. “Father,” she said to him, “remember 
that you have only a few years to live. 
Die honorably!” The old man answered 
through his moans: “Faithless one, to speak 
to me thus!” The next day it was Sarah’s 
turn. For five days, each morning, the sol- 
diers came for her, took her to a house they 
had commandeered and as she refused to 
answer their questions, tied her to the door, 
whipped her, pulled her nails and applied 
burning bricks to her chest and her feet. 
Then, through the empty street, they would 
bring her back to her house to repeat the same 
proceedings the next day. She was doubt- 


[197 7 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


less still hoping that an advance of the Eng- 
lish army might miraculously save her. But 
on the sixth day she learned that the Kaima- 
kam had given orders to have her transferred 
to Nazareth with the other suspects and she 
abandoned all hope. While she was alone for 
an instant in her room, she wrote to one of 
her family: 

“If the Turks leave the workmen of the 
Station at liberty, see that they go on with the 
work. Let them use the wheat and the barley 
that we still have and give them thirty francs 
a month. If they are forbidden to work, 
give them each fifty francs and let them go. 
Tell my brothers to avenge me. No pity for 
those bandits, they have had none for me. I 
have not the strength to bear my sufferings 
and the martyrdom they force upon me any 
longer. I would rather kill myself than let 
them ill-treat me with their dirty hands. 
They want to send me to Damascus, where 
they will certainly hang me. Luckily I have 
a small revolver, (the one probably that her 
brother had sent her). I don’t want them 


[198 7 


TA SLORY OF SARAH 





to have the use of my body. My sorrow is 
especially unendurable when they strike my 
father. But it will be in vain that they’ll try 
all their cruelty upon us. We won’t talk. 
Remember that we died courageously with- 
out saying a word. What do our sufferings 
matter! We have sacrificed ourselves, but we 
have saved the population and liberated the 
country. Don’t pay any attention to gossips 
and scandalmongers. I have worked for one 
thing only: the betterment of my people. 
Try to go to the mountains as soon as the 
soldiers are gone. Goto X , tell him, Kill 
yourself, don’t surrender. Here they are.... 





I can’t write any more.” 

The Turks were already there. She asked 
them to let her go for a second to her dress- 
ing-room. She shut the door behind her and 
almost at the same instant a shot was heard 
followed by the noise of a body falling. The 
soldiers broke the door. ‘They found her 
bathed in blood but breathing still. The bul- 
let having entered through her mouth had 
come out through the neck. The doctor of 


1997 


PON OT YEA Te NG sd ee he Oh, Sd ee ee 


the colony, an old friend of the Aronsohns, 
was called in. Sarah asked him to do noth- 
ing, to let her die. The officers who came to 
see her, struck by her courage, promised not 
to torment her any more. Her agony lasted 
three days. Her limbs were paralyzed but 
her head was clear. Her only fear was lest 
she might let some name escape in her delir- 
ium. She was longing for death, and, when 
she felt it near, “All right,” she said, “now 
there is nothing more to be feared.” On the 
last day of Succoth, on the day of the Feast 
of the Law, she left the land of Israel. 

Some days later the English army attacked 
the German and Turkish army, which 
retreated without any fighting. They en- 
tered Jerusalem, they freed the whole of Pal- 
estine without firing a single shot. Mean- 
while, in Damascus, Lichansky had been 
hanged. Three of his companions who had 
been arrested with him profited by the dis- 
order caused by the approach of the Allies 
to escape to the mountains tied to one another 
and to the officer who was guarding them. 

As for Aaron Aronsohn he also met a 


[ 2007 


THE STORY OF SARAH 


tragic death. A short while after the Armi- 
stice had been signed, he returned to London 
and began traveling frequently between 
London and Paris to give the Peace Confer- 
ence the information they needed about 
Palestine. It was while he was on one of 
these missions, that he crashed to the ground 
near Boulogne, in the aeroplane which car- 
ried him. 

Such is the story of Sarah and her com- 
panions. In Palestine they do not talk about 
it willingly. When I approached that sub- 
ject I felt a veil between the person I was 
talking to and myself. Perhaps they have 
not forgotten the dangers they went through. 
Danger has always made a strong impres- 
sion upon the Jews. Perhaps they feel, too, 
that the Turks who had welcomed them in 
their distress deserved better treatment, and 
that over this drama of Athlit there hangs a 
shadow which, in spite of Absalom’s and 
Sarah’s sacrifice, will always prevent it from 
becoming one of those events which a whole 
nation, moved by pity and admiration, may 
incorporate into its tradition. 


[201 4 


on i a 


4 
# 





THE LITTLE GIRL OF 
THE GHETTO 


¥ 


4 ae 


V4) Le ihe cy ‘y “ital . nh Sad on : nat 4 , 
uy DA +e ie Th F i Sy te aa ea! s 

; ‘ . et) : A yy a ey Py ie ° i wl 
Peet Cols anon ; Abana fe ate ese he 
aa te beatae eee Une oy 


3 


Fe ed SEES ad 3 





CHAPTER X 
THE LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 


WHEN I went back to Jerusalem the door- 
man of the convent of Notre Dame de 
France gave me a card on which was written: 
“Jacok Birnbaum, once your pupil, salutes 
you, Monsieur le Professeur. I shall come 
back to-morrow.” 

Jacob Birnbaum! That name took me 
back twenty years to a time when I was a 
lecturer in the University of Budapest. 
To tell the truth, explaining La Fontaine or 
the “Neveu de Rameau” to foreign minds is 
truly an idiotic idea. My students, Hun- 
garians or Jews, were about my age, and we 
lived as comrades. Very often after the lec- 
ture we used to continue our discussion in 
one of those cafés, very ostentatiously luxuri- 
ous, where all Central Europeans try to es- 
cape from boredom, read the newspapers and 
gladly merge their individual existences in 


[ 205 7 


“NEXT YR AR OUN Ud Tn O'S Abeer 


the collective one. At the same time, in the 
great plain, between the Danube and the 
Tisza, the flocks of sheep and herds of horses 
stop wandering in the pastures and flock to- 
gether under the protection of the watch- 
dogs. In the capital of this pastoral country, 
the herds of men, urged on by the same deep 
instinct, avoid the evening solitude by seek- 
ing shelter in the cafés, under the protection 
of their shepherds, the waiters. 

Birnbaum, who, before coming to Buda- 
pest, had led for some years the beggar’s life 
of a student of a Yeshiva, was a member of 
the small band which I took with me to con- 
tinue the work of the University more agree- 
ably, in front of a glass of Pilsener. I had 
not seen him since that far-distant time but 
I had often thought about him, because he 
was the first to reveal to me an extraordinary 
universe in Jewish life, the picturesqueness 
and mystery of which captivated my imagi- 
nation at once. Here, in Jerusalem itself, 
in the valley of Josaphat, I had often won- 
dered if among all those tombstones there 


[ 206 7 


LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 


was one which marked the resting-place of 
his grandfather, the only one of those innu- 
merable dead of whom I knew something. 
Jacob Birnbaum had told me so many stories 
about the astonishing old man, amid the noise 
of the cymbals and the violins of the Tziganes! 
During his lifetime he had been one of those 
old men who study only the Talmud and 
Zohar, who spend their days and a good part 
of their nights exploring these far countries 
of logic and imagination in which so many 
Jews find happiness. Only once had he left 
his small village to go to Budapest, and 
there, for the first time, he had seen some- 
thing which was not a village; houses with 
several floors, iron bridges on the river, streets 
lighted at night, a railway and many other 
strange sights. Then this untiring reader of 
the most ancient thoughts, who had spent 
thousands and thousands of hours upon the 
fantastic problems discussed for centuries by 
the Jewry of the Orient, surprised by all 
those new things and comparing the Chris- 
tians’ activity with his own, had made this 


[207 7 


“NEXT YEAROIN JERUSALEM" 


superb comment: “They have been working, 
too!” But driving at once from his mind the 
thought of those inventions, useless because 
they were profane, he had gone back to the 
Talmud and the Zohar. ‘Then, one day, the 
longing of all of his race for Palestine had 
seized him, the ancient desire to die in the 
Ancestors’ Land. In the words of a Hebrew 
poet, he wished to go and breathe the breath 
of life in the air of Jerusalem, the perfume of 
myrrh in its dust and to drink the honey of 
its waters. He left everything, his room, his 
small table, the synagogue to which he had 
gone every day for sixty years, his daughter, 
his son-in-law and his grandchildren. For 
more than a year they had no news from him. 
What was the use of writing a letter? What 
was there to tell? What could he say that 
would not be superfluous? Could a man like 
him find time to waste on such unimportant 
cares, the time when he was busy praying for 
all the Jews? .. . At last one of the alms- 
gatherers brought the news that he had mar- 
ried a girl of fourteen, exceedingly beautiful 


[ 208 7 





ET La em Cn Reiss | OUT TER: tee Ge A Fa UPe' O 


(like everything else in Jerusalem) and that 
his wife had given him a child. All the fam- 
ily had rejoiced and in the money-box that 
hung on the wall, they had thrown some 
kreutzers for the Holy Halouka. 


The next day Jacob Birnbaum appeared at 
my hotel. I had been expecting to see one of 
those poor men who live with difficulty by 
teaching and it took me some time to recog- 
nize in this man, still unhealthy-looking, it is 
true, but very comfortably clad, the poor boy 
I had known. 

“Well, you see,” he said to me, as naturally 
as if our conversations had never stopped (so 
much so, that I thought I heard behind his 
voice the cymbals and the violins of the Tzi- 
ganes), “you see, I went on begging. We be- 
gin begging when we are children; it is that 
way with us Jews, and as a matter of fact, 
it is that way with everybody. I went to 
America and once there a great deal was 
given to me. I could, if I wished, make all 
the Rabbis of the Carpathians millionaires. 


[ 209 7 


WNEAT YEAR IN JERUSALEM" 


I could give to all the Yeshivas gold-lettered 
Talmuds, but I will do nothing of the sort. 
The school of poverty would be ruined for 
ever and I would certainly destroy the most 
beautiful secret of Israel... .” 

He had made a large fortune very quickly, 
a thing that always astonishes us Europeans, 
seeming to be only luck as in fairy-tales. 
Without going into details, this is the way 
he explained his success: ‘How did I make 
it? I don’t know myself. I did this and I 
did that. If I were to give you a list of all 
the enterprises I have gone into and a long 
and detailed recital of all the businesses I 
have had a hand in, or rather which have had 
a hand on me, it would mean nothing. Suc- 
cess is not any easier to explain than failure 
or unhappiness. I am rather inclined to be- 
lieve that fate became tired of buffeting me. 
I resisted so hard, I never gave in to misfor- 
tune, I struggled and always came back 
again, even under the most difficult cireum- 
stances. You know, Monsieur le Professeur 
(he still gave me this title which once upon 


[ 210 7 





LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 


a time had meant a great deal to him, but 
which now must have been in his eyes a very 
modest title indeed), that, no offense to you, 
the lessons of the Yeshiva have been much 
more useful to me than the tragedies of Ra- 
cine on which you lectured at the University. 
You see, I have always remained a Talmud 
student, a hair-splitter, clever at finding the 
strong and the weak points of an argument. 
Well-made syllogisms will always rule the 
world. Add a little madness, a bit of the 
moon which with us Hebrews is always some- 
where in our brains, to reward us, or maybe 
to punish us, for having looked so often up to 
her in the evenings of Neomenie. That’s the 
thing that enables us to go into ventures that 
the good sense or rather the short-sightedness 
of other people makes them avoid. We Jews 
belong to two planets, the earth and the 
moon. Weare skeptical and enthusiastic, we 
don’t believe in anything and we always hope 
for something, a dollar, a woman, a rise in 
gasoline, the return to Jerusalem, universal 


E211] 


a 
CONEXPT YEAR IN JERUSALEM, 





revolution, in other words, in what we call the 
Messiah. ...” 

Like all the other Jews all over the world 
he became very much excited when he read 
the Balfour Declaration; he became a Child 
of the Moon as he said himself. Newt year 
in Jerusalem! The old wish repeated each 
Easter had hitherto been expressed without 
much hope that it would ever be fulfilled. 
Yet now one had to believe in it, since it had 
come to pass! He had come here to see for 
himself, to get acquainted with the miracle. 
To what extent had this very practical mind 
been carried away by the dream of seeing all 
the Jews of the world settle in Palestine? He 
had believed in it for a moment, because he 
came back to that idea several times, speak- 
ing with an indescribable tone of irony and 
bitterness: “It is astonishing how we Jews, 
intelligent as a rule (though that side of us is 
always exaggerated and some of our real 
qualities are never even mentioned!), become 
stupid when it is a question of Judea.” I 
think that deep down in himself, he had, in 


212] 


EE Di eA ee GR pet on Gia Fe 142 O 


coming to Jerusalem, yielded to the ancient 
desire of Zion, given in to the same attraction 
which took his grandfather and many other 
Jews before him to the Holy City. He could 
see it himself, not without sadness, because 
to-day, his illusions, if he ever had had any, 
were quite gone. No, he was not one of those 
exalted Jews, who, from morning till night, 
had tried to convince me that Palestine was 
a new Eldorado; that all the Jews are born 
farmers and herdsmen; that the existence led 
by the Jewish colonies is idyllic and that the 
haloutzim are in the universe an unknown 
and beautiful type of men. As it went along 
begging, Zionism was not, after all, the beg- 
gar full of hope, the beautiful wandering 
idea that deserves passionate devotion. 
“How difficult it is,’ he remarked to me, on 
one occasion, “to make intelligent use of one 
dollar or a million!’ He had, once for all, 
decided that the thing was not worth while, 
and when I met him he was only interested 
in trying, in the old ghetto, to hear once again 


[213] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


the ancestral voices and to revive the memo- 
ries of his youth, 

And now he was going to do as his grand- 
father had done some thirty years before. I 
was mistaken. His story was not quite the 
same, because, by marrying a girl of fourteen, 
his grandfather had only obeyed the law of 
Jerusalem which forbids celibacy and I am 
sure that he had never worried about the 
beauty or the ugliness of the girl. Jacob 
Birnbaum had fallen in love, of all places in 
the world, in Jerusalem, where people’s 
thoughts don’t usually seem to turn to love! 
Fallen in love, perhaps that is an exaggera- 
tion. He had the most tender feelings for a 
— girl about fifteen years old, one of the numer- 
ous relatives that he owed to the favor with 
which God had looked upon the household of 
his grandfather. He kept his incognito so 
that he would not be annoyed by them, but 
sometimes he was tempted to claim the rela- 
tionship and to ask the family to let him have 
the child. “Tl take her to Cleveland,” he 
said to me, “there her life would be very 


[2147 


Diet hi Ol Wn be Ga Birla 0 


different from the one she leads here. The 
only trouble is that I wonder whether I have 
a real affection for this little girl or if I am 
carried away by the thought of all I could do 
for her. There must be something wrong in 
my case, because while thinking about all 
sorts of romantic possibilities, I am nearly 
sure that, in the end, I won’t take her away 
with me.... Do you know, God must enjoy 
Himself greatly when He refrains from 
changing suddenly the conditions of human 
beings! Secondly (this way of putting his 
arguments was habitual and made me recog- 
nize in him the student of the Yeshiva), this 
child of Jerusalem transplanted to America 
might lose all her charm. There she would be 
just one more little Jewess with Paris gowns 
and pearls around her neck. In a few weeks 
she would be as insupportably vain as all the 
women there. I think the best thing for her 
is to stay here. I don’t want to take away 
from Jehovah the task of directing the lives 
of His creatures. .. .” 

And as he spoke his steps would take him 


[2157 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


towards the blue-painted house around which 
he let his thoughts dwell complacently. We 
would look into the court and occasionally 
see a rather ordinary-looking child, whose sole 
interest for me lay in the dreams, of which, 
unknown to her, she was the object and which 
could in one day change the course of her 
whole life. 

Birnbaum and I used to walk all the time 
in the old Jewish quarter, up and down 
through those narrow echoing streets, whose 
surprises were now familiar to me. We 
would vie with each other in trying to dis- 
cover some new synagogue, buried like a 
treasure in its subterranean court. We used 
to go to the Wall of Wailing and I could no 
longer understand how on the day of my 
arrival I had been able to think as I did: 
“What pleasure can one find down here, 
when up there, on the esplanade, around the 
Mosque of Omar, one can find a paradise!” 
I used to go up there often, to walk on the 
wide flagstoned or moss-covered expanse, 
thinking I would spend the whole morning 


[2167 


LETRD ES GLE LV OP UT AE GH TT O 


feasting my eyes on this pleasant sight, that 
chance had made so perfect, those fountains 
where no water flows, those sun-caressed steps 
where one can always see some strayed 
babouche, those cypresses and the mosque 
where men’s prayers seem to have been trans- 
formed into rubies, into emeralds, into a bril- 
liance ignorant of sorrow and death. ‘The 
reverie that men pursue there does not last 
long, for mystery is lacking. ‘There is no 
depth to Islam’s thought. It is a morality 
fit for Bedouins only. How flat the Koran 
seems when compared with the Old Testa- 
ment and the Gospel! This very precious 
landscape becomes very boring, in spite of 
Scheherezade dancing behind the veil of 
prayers! It seems as if one’s shadow were 
lost, the feeling we Occidentals have of a cer- 
tain responsibility which keeps our mind 
clear and straight. It may be a kind of mad- 
ness to regret such a burden, to ask for 
shadows and sadness in this place of light, 
but what can be done about it? Carefully, 
taking small steps, I cross the esplanade, go 


27] 


ONES DY Boa TN Tm RO Sd Gg ee 


down the steps I mounted so light-heartedly 
a moment ago, I follow the alley of yew-trees, 
then I pass under the great vault and go 
through the maze of narrow streets of the 
ghetto with as much ease as an old Jew from 
Bels or Zadagora. 

I do not like poverty and there everything 
is miserably poor, but this is no ordinary pov- 
erty; it occupies and feeds the mind, yet leaves 
it always unsatisfied, unlike that noble insen- 
sitive beauty that I have just left behind up 
there, that beauty, so sure of itself that even 
dreams can add nothing to it. 

As we went along Jacob Birnbaum would 
go on with his thoughts, sometimes communi- 
cating them to me with an air of being dis- 
gusted even with his own ideas. He always 
came back to this: “What reason have we, 
we Israelites, to think that the air of this 
country will miraculously give us an extraor- 
dinary genius which could not flourish ex- 
cept on the Land of our Ancestors? Thank 
God we have not had to remain in Palestine 
to remain intelligent. The Jews of Babylon 


[2187] 


LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 





have been as famous as Jerusalem’s and in 
exile we always have given some great men 
to the world. Now they want to make us 
believe that in lieu of a Jewish State we can 
create here an intellectual center from which 
the Hebrew spirit will radiate to all Jewry. 
What is the Hebrew spirit? I can recognize 
it in old Sonnenfeld, in an old Rabbi of the 
Carpathian Mountains, much more than in 
these modern Jews, who bring with them I 
don’t know what kind of Slavic soul, preten- 
tious, expansive, agitated, incapable of seeing 
reality as it really is. In this ancient Jeru- 
salem they are killing something purely Jew- 
ish, really unique in the world, and what are 
they going to put in its place? Have you 
ever been to Tel Aviv?...” 

Of course, I had been to Tel Aviv. Itisa 
small town outside Jaffa’s gates. On the sea- 
side, it possesses straight promenades bor- 
dered with eucalyptuses. It has a casino, too, 
some cinemas and villas where the Zionists 
who have come to build up a new world here 
have imitated the most ordinary watering- 


[219] 


“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


places. This town, the first built by them- 
selves on the sea-front, this window on the 
open sea, this sea-breeze, this opening upon 
the universe, create in them a touching exalta- 
tion. Although it lies flat on the sand they 
have called it, in their oriental enthusiasm, 
Tel Aviv, that is to say, the Hill of Spring, 
and Tel Aviv is dearer to their hearts than 
the old Jerusalem. Jerusalem represents the 
old thoughts, and too many Jews, according 
to them, are still its victims. It is the town 
of the Commandments, of the oppressive let- 
ter of the Law that ties one down to the 
past. It is the town of the Wall, of the eyes 
turned towards Jehovah, of the Jews who 
expect to get everything from Heaven, the 
impossible, the miraculous. It is the town 
to which one comes to die. Tel Aviv, on the 
contrary, is a place where, God be praised, 
nothing is expected from the Messiah, and 
the inhabitants expect to find their happiness 
in the eucalyptuses, in the electric light and 
English comfort. 

—‘Well,” Jacob Birnbaum used to say, 


[2207 





Lite EP eGi ie DOR Dae Gai e Te? O 


“I would rather have Jerusalem than Tel 
Aviv. I love its ghetto, its poverty, its beg- 
ging population, pursuing their ancient 
dream, a dream that you can think absurd 
or magnificent, just as you please. There I 
recognize myself, I find my soul, the breath 
of my life, the real Jewish spirit... .” 

I left Jerusalem for a while to go to Syria, 
leaving Jacob Birnbaum to his problems. 
When I came back he had gone. They told 
me at his hotel that he had gone back to 
America. Had he gone alone? Had he 
claimed his family and taken back with him 
the little Jewess, of whom it would be diffi- 
cult to say whether she occupied more his 
heart or his mind? Both hypotheses seemed 
plausible and if I had had to make a wager I 
would not have known which one to choose. 

I went at once to the narrow street that we 
had gone through together so often. I saw 
no one in the courtyard. I went downstairs 
and through the wide-open door, Surrepti- 
tiously I looked into the one room that con- 


[2217 





“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 


stituted the family dwelling. ‘The girl was 
still there. 

After all, there were great divergences be- 
tween grandfather and grandson in spite of 
deep affinities. The old man would not have 
hesitated; he would have married the girl. 
Then, I thought that by not pulling this leaf 
from the tree of the ghetto, Jacob Birnbaum 
had revealed himself to be more like his 
grandfather than if he had taken her with 
him to America. I went on with my walk 
through the hilly streets where I could have 
gone with my eyes shut, thinking: “He came 
here full of hope and he went away disillu- 
sioned. Should I pity him? Maybe not. 
With the whole of Israel, he believed for a 
while in the dreams of Dr. Herzl and he was 
right to believe in them. But is there any- 
thing in the world worth any enthusiasm, any 
desire? It is a mad idea to want to bring all 
the Jewry of the universe into this poverty- 
stricken country. It will be very difficult to 
enable even two or three hundred thousand 
Jews to live here. The Jews will go on lead- 


[2227 


LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 


ing among other nations their adventurous 
lives to-day just as they did yesterday. They 
can’t be absorbed by them, the blood of their 
race is too strong, but they can’t do without 
other races either, because is there anywhere 
in the world a place where they would, if they 
were all together, find the profits of all kinds 
that scattering through the universe has 
brought them? Wherever they are, they 
always carry in their heart the love of Zion. 
This nostalgic desire, this aspiration that 
they can’t and don’t want to satisfy, this 
struggle between realities and dreams makes 
Jewish history a drama unique in the world. 
It has lasted since the beginning of time. 
There seems to be no end to it—and it is this 
struggle which gives Jewish history its poetic 
grandeur.” 


THE END 





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